Junior maths challenge 2025

[scisso]

Does anyone know when the results and boundaries get announced? How was this year’s paper in comparison to previous years?

DD sat it and thought some of them were quite hard so had to guess them, but she hasn’t done much of the past papers so doesn’t have much to compare against.

any insights would be very much appreciated.

My son scored 129 - and so did 2 others in his cohort.

Oh - and I know it was Question 22 that my son answered wrongly! He knew the answer and inexpicably circled the wrong one, which he has been kicking himself about. A good lesson for him to be more careful in future!

user149799568 Thanks for that, very helpful, being new to the game I had no idea that was the way it worked. If it was the same this year I'd tell my DD to take the gamble and omit section A.

AliTheMinx Congratulations. Having 2 others in the cohort is fantastic news too, it must be a school that has high maths potential.

One reason I like my DDs 130 is I know unless someone in Yr8 got full marks she'll be Best in school. If she'd 129'ed then a 130 could have been above her.

@SpikeWithoutASoul it is very good and means she scored more than the kangaroo cut off which is a very good gold!

Best in school is best in school across both year groups. It means she got higher than all the Year 7s and Year 8s. My ds got a best in year certificate in year 7 for JMC but a year 8 child who got into the Olympiad round got an higher mark and that child got best in school.

Our son also got Q9 wrong, for the same reason.

130 is amazing. Huge congratulations!

My son was top in the school last year (from Years 7 and 8), and I think is now joint top this year with the 2 other boys, as I haven't heard of anyone else in the school getting above 129.

Good luck to all for the Kangaroo and Olympiad x

Thank you. Having 3 129s in the same yr though is amazing like I said. In the future they should all push each other to greater heights.

I think these are really fine margins and my DD could easily have dropped a Q and been a Kangaroo. On this it seems harsh, especially on the 124s. Generally this yr anymore than one question wrong and you are a Kangaroo but then those with up to 6 wrong would all be kangaroos as well. Imo there is a big difference between 19/25 and 23/25, and I feel the 25pt range from 100 to 124 is too large.

I think they should do a Super Kangaroo level, maybe top 3,000, say for those with 2-3 wrong. Pitch it at say 115+.

Agree there always seems quite a narrow band from Gold threshold to Kangaroo threshold (always historically less than two questions worth).
On paper Gold is 8.3% of pupils. If we guess that 300,000 take part then that's ~25,000 Golds
Then Kangaroo is ~top 10,000, or ~3.3%
Anecdotally this fits ~50 unprepared candidates in my son's school - over 10 got Gold but only 4 into Kangaroo.
(Olympiad is ~1200 so top 0.4%)
So that is telling us the scoring distribution is clearly densely populated around the Gold to Kangaroo band but this is I also realise (somewhat interestingly) connected the make-up of the mark scheme.
This year you needed 17 or 18 from 25 to get 91, a Gold. For Kangaroo score 100 could be achieved with scores 18-20/25 (made up differently).
There are many different pathways to reach a total score in this band so this will bump the frequency higher
Someone smarter than me could explain this better whereas there is only one way to score 135

By the way strong kids could totally take the IMC, as far as I can see the only additional topic required there is Pythagoras (which usually features in different ways in several questions). Yes more algebra is helpful but not essential.
Do any schools do that?

It amazes me that at DS's school 10 got through to the Olympiad and 70+ to the Kangaroo. No prep at school, they were only told the day before.

Statistico Being new to all this I have done a fair bit of reading around. Your percent thresholds are about what I've seen but thinking a little deeper there is more to it than that.

From looking around there seems to be about 610k kids per year in state schools around yr7/8 plus another 40k independent, across the 2 yrs that's 1.3m. What I've seen looking around is for some schools they dont seem to bother, or only admit the top set or top 2 sets. Then you have the international effect (probably sub 10%), but probably high achieving schools which will skew the results a bit more at the top end.

Then I've seen 300k entrants quoted, sometimes 300k+, sometimes up to 400k. for simplicity lets say its 325k, and lets assume within that 325k we have 90%+ of the kids capable of gold and above.

So I reckon while your percents are right, in the wider population you can probably "about" quarter them all. I'd say if every kid in the UK took the test Gold would be somewhere around top 2%, which in itself is a great achievement. Kangaroo meanwhile sub 1%.

I can't remember how the maths exactly works but FYI there are just over 480k ways to score 17/25 and 480k ways to score 18/25....obviously not all these are used.

swimmingoggles surely that can't be right? Which school is it?

@Jonny234 interesting points! We were told at some point kangaroo is maybe top 4% uk.

Given that it’s a selective sub group that take JMC, and I think 50% don’t get a certificate iirc, a bronze is a great achievement and so is every certificate. Qualifying for any rounds is just the cherry on top.

Our main aim is really for ds to enjoy maths and not be upset by pressure/marks.

Wow, thats amazing given only about 1200 children in the entire country go through

Are they definitely doing the JMC rather than the PMC (P for Primary) - which is the one aimed at years 5 & 6? There is also the FMC (F for first) for lower KS2.

My Y8 DD has just got best in school, again. And is through to kangeroo, a couple of marks from olympiad.
She knows she got an easier question wrong when discussing answers with her y7 sibling.

She was also best in school in Y6 in 2023 (beating all Y7 and Y8) and went through to kangeroo then too

(She's at an independent school which is both primary and secondary, and is in the times top10 secondary independant schools)

In Y7 she was really poorly with tonsilutus.... she only went into school on the day for the 1 hour to sit the exam, where she got 2nd best in school, and just missed out on kangeroo but still got gold. She was really properly unwell, and her brain was not thinking last year, but she didn't want to miss it.

Yes it's definitely the JMC. It says for Year 8 and below on the paper, and kids from our school have qualified for the Kangaroo most years. We still haven't found out our DD's results, probably as they just finished SATs yesterday.

@Jonny234 it's a super-selective grammar school. I’m sure this isn’t the only school like this but great environment to be in if your child is gifted.

One of the Croydon grammars we noticed last year actually adds up Math + English for their overall entrance score. Most schools do not do this. I can think of no better method to select mathmos.

Our son's state primary only let them do the JMC, not the PMC.

17 opted to take it.

Three Year 6 pupils got gold. Two Year 5 got gold - one of these got Kangaroo and the other (our son) got through to the Olympiad.

Feels like a pretty decent result (esp for a state primary) given the target age is 11-13.

Wow that is great - well done. Ours also state primary. Not sure what they’re playing at though as still no results given out! Will have to put it out of our minds til next week now

Still no results 🤷‍♀️ anyone else

We got the result today. It was the first time for DS (Y7) and he got 107. We were told it was the best of Y7/8 at his the school ( average public school). We are happy with his result, he had little practise and we didnt know about the challenage until quite late. He loved Math and numbers throughout primary but we never pushed anything. He got 120 in Sats math last year. He is now invited to take part in n3xt challenge in June.

Does anyone have good reccomendations for links or workbook so that we could prepare for the competition?

That's great :)

That's a great score with no prep!

You can see lots of past papers - solutions to the Junior Kangaroo here (toggle the filter to that paper choice). If your time is limited, concentrate on the last 10 harder questions in each paper.
https://ukmt.org.uk/competition-papers/jsf/jet-engine:free-past-papers/tax/challenge-type:68/

I would also recommend you review 'Solutions and Investigations' to the JMC 2025 paper just sat as that gives some insight into the thinking of the question setters and some neater approaches which may become useful in the Kangaroo

google kangeroo maths challenge.

My DD is through again too, We had a look at these when she went through in y6. (she's now in year 8)

But to be honest you can't really prep that much.... the questions are hard... if you have a "mathsy-brain" you can probably do some of them. (and the fact that they are through shows they have that mathsy-brain)....... but they are really challenging and prepping isnt really going to help.

Many, perhaps its fair to say that most, adults would score 0..... meanwhile some 10 year olds can answer some questions because their brains are wired like that.

DD was best in school at JMC in year 6 and was almost blown away by how hard kangeroo was.... but she still got some points.

Well a math-loving (stem degree) but rusty adult here and JMC is good fun, but I still couldn't answer a couple of Q's without a proper think, so certainly not within the time.
My DS got exact same score in Kangaroo as JMC last year. He made less silly mistakes early on but the last 5-7 Q's of Kangaroo are harder than JMC.
To put another way I'd say there's at least a 15 question overlap in difficulty level so don't be put off the Kangaroo, it's not so different than JMC.
Some of the later questions might be best solved with algebra but many can be figured out without it. In fact the UKMT solutions love their overly complicated algebraic solutions a bit too much IMHO, sometimes there's a much more elegant visual or symmetry based solution.
Good luck!