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 in y5 got kangaroo, he is in ofsted good state school. In year 4 he got silver. He did some old papers at home.

Well done all! I’m simply blown away by many of your comments. DD got a gold and only just made it through to Kangaroo and she is super happy.

I was new to the game so have been doing some sums.

Apparently 1.3m ish kids across yrs 7 and 8 in the UK. 300k+ take the test. Looking at social media feeds of schools a lot of those taking the test are just set 1, maybe sets 1+2 in schools. So from the off the competition is higher than the national average.

To get Kangaroo, top 10k is an achievement to be proud of. Well done.

My daughter received gold certificate last year in JMC and went on to do Kangaroo but she only got a merit for Kangaroo. She is in year 7 now and this year she got full mark. She has told me that it is much easier this year. I personally don't like some of the questions. They are very different than the maths knowledge required for GCSE or A level exam.

Great results. I think you might need to appreciate what is being tested. GCSE and A level is higher level maths theory and is not tested....as such. What the junior challenge seems to be doing is testing students ability to apply knowledge up to about the end of KS3 at an advanced level.

Not to disagree at on this friendly thread but you definitely don't need all KS3 topics for JMC.
There's no Pythagoras (that's only on IMC) and certainly no trigonometry. It is helpful to know things like polygons but good mathematicians can usually work them out from scratch using exterior angle arguments rather than tiresome formulas you learn for GCSE. Triangles too.
Also helpful to understand powers, but you rarely see roots.
You can see from the number of y5 and y6 pupils successfully taking the exam it's not about topic knowledge but about deeper understanding. You really don't need much algebra either although it can be helpful towards end of Kangaroo.
In fact all the questions are designed to be 'figure out able' if you can think clearly from solid KS2 knowledge
If there is one thing I would teach all JMC entrants it would be prime factor trees as it's a fantastically accessible tool useful for many JMC problems (which tend to have a number theory leanings). My son finally just encountered these in school (second term y7) but no mention yet of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic...yet

I agree, I stand corrected. KS3 is too high and as it includes yr9 work would not apply for the age range.

I've had a look briefly at some Olympiad papers and algebra is very handy. If you can conceptualise how to apply it can be an easy way to pick up marks.

Made a note of your comments regarding prime factor trees, I cant remember them but my DD says she's done them in the past. We'll look at them pre exam, thanks.

I made comments last wk about maybe having a super kangaroo level. After looking at the IMC they in fact have grey and pink kangaroo levels. Imo they need to implement that for the JMC. It's a big leap from 100 to 124.

DS (Year 7) came home today with a silver certificate, really pleased for him. He is at a non selective state and his Sparks leader board shows he is ranked 56 out of 120 in his year group.

Well done to all the DS and DD for their JMC results and to those who have got into the follow on rounds. Does anyone know roughly the percentage of boys vs girls taking part in the Junior Mathematical Olympiad? Seems from social media to be mostly boys but I can see a few girls here on Mumsnet who have qualified so just wondered what the split is? Thanks.

DD got a bronze - year 7 at a local comp where they were not prepared in any way so I’m pretty impressed!

No idea but I've looked at social media and the split does seem boy heavy now I come to think of it.

could that possibly be why there is the Mathematical Competition for Girls and the Mathematical Olympiad for Girls? I’ve always wondered why they have a separate Olympiad for girls only.

At the selectivity level of the Olympiads, i.e., top 0.5% of participants or so, the boy:girl ratio in math tends to be about 80:20. It skews even more towards boys as it gets more selective.

From the Senior Mathematical Challenge, about 1000 children qualify for the British Mathematical Olympiad Round 1. Of these, very likely more than 800 are boys and fewer than 200 are girls. The Mathematical Olympiad for Girls was created so that more girls would have the opportunity to experience Olympiad-style questions, which are very different from Challenge-style questions.

There are five questions on the MOG, of which only three require full Olympiad-style solutions rather than all six on the BMO1. Unlike the BMO1, questions on the MOG are broken up into parts which are intended to lead a girl towards a good solution. Like the BMO1, the MOG is nominally geared towards sixth formers but the level of the questions is lower than the BMO1, probably more like the first three questions of the Maclaurin (Year 11) Olympiad.

The problem is that, with each school being allowed four free entries to the MOG and an unlimited number of discretionary entries, there were too many papers to mark. According to the 2024 Markers Report, 4749 papers were returned in the MOG this year, vs ~1000 in the BMO1. From next year, each school will be allowed only two free entries and restricted to no more than two discretionary entries.

Can I just ask what leads you to believe a 80:20 ratio?

I have nothing to go off myself, but like I said yesterday I didn't think about it until a poster on here mentioned it, and looking around social media there is definitely a boy bias at Olympiad.

Aside - Thanks for the info on MOG.

I am not aware that UKMT have published data on this topic, but their US counterparts used to. Of the top 5000 or so scores on the AMC12, the first round competition for 16-18 year olds in the US, typically about 80% belonged to boys. The US has a population five times that of the UK. I am extrapolating that a selectivity level of top 5000 in the US corresponds to one of top 1000 in the UK.

As for higher levels, Wikipedia claims that, in the International Mathematical Olympiad, "During the period 2000–2021, there were only 1,102 female contestants (9.2%) out of a total of 11,950 contestants. The gap is even more significant in terms of IMO gold medallists; from 1959 to 2021, there were 43 female (3.3%) and 1295 male gold medal winners."

Thanks for that. I wrote to UKMT the other day asking for granularity on the Y7/ Y8 split knowing there are the odd younger kids too. They didnt disclose but just reconfirmed about 1,200 qualified for the Olympiad.

What you write is helpful and I'm surprised that the demarcation level is so wide. The only thing I would say is it possible that at younger ages that this may diminish. But contradicting that is an observation I initially overlooked..... anecdotally looking around there is a big ratio of boy to girl Olympiad qualifiers on Social media.

With my prudent hat on, assuming the Olympiads are 1,200 and making the assumptions at say it's 1/3's girls who qualify and there are more Y8's than Y7's who qualify, I feel safe saying my Yr7 DD has finished in the top 200 Yr7 girls who took the test. On that basis I'm very proud of her.

Stretching it to 80/20 and say 1/3 yr7, 2/3's Yr8 would be top 80. But that maybe feels like a stretch.

Thanks for this. Interesting to see some actual figures surrounding boy:girl ratio in US/international competitions. Would be very interesting to see the actual split in UK competitions and number of high scoring girls getting medals etc.
Boys (and potentially Co-Ed too) schools from what I can see seem to promote and prepare students far more for Maths Competitions. It’s very frustrating if you have a DD that is good at Maths! Don’t think the reduction of places to enter MOG is going to be very helpful for girl’s opportunities to take part in Olympiad competitions. For those girls at selective or high performing girls’ schools there will definitely be far more than 4 students that would benefit from the opportunity and will now miss out. Very few would get into BMO via Senior Maths Challenge. Although I do appreciate it requires a lot of volunteers to mark these papers.

Until the posts above I didn't realise girls were so unrepresented. There is probably some aggregation going on where small cohorts of high achieving boys are together in the same school and they push each other higher and learn from each other. For girls this seems less likely to exist. I also think girls schools while seemingly promoting Maths, STEM, etc, perhaps dont follow through on it enough.

I expect your probably right on approach too, some will be heavily prepared for it, while others wont be.

Huge congrats to your daughter scisso!

My DD is Y7 and also got a gold and through to Kangaroo. No Olympiads in her year group but one in the year above her I think. They don't do any prep in school for JMC but she does Parallel Academy and did two past papers as part of that (plus they often have a JMC style question in their homework) so she had a bit of prep with Parallel.

Does anyone have any idea why UKMT have omitted Section A all together yet keeping 6 questions for the 2 hour paper? Surely that would give them more time to work on each question. Did they find that in previous years not enough participants were able to work on Section B?

Someone above suggested that recently a decent amount of candidates were skipping section A entirely in order to spend more time on Section B.
Previously it was just 1 mark each for the 10 questions of section A so total max 10 marks for the section. Then section B was 5 questions each worth up to 10 marks each, so total 50 marks available in section B. Total for paper of 60 marks.
It is my understanding that with section A removed this has been replaced with 6 questions worth up to 10 marks each so still total 60 marks available.

Having looked at a paper with my DC they would have naturally spent a disproportionate amount of time on Section A so I can perhaps see how this has come about - it does seem connected with more competition, coaching and practice as I can also see that back in the day section A was an opportunity to score some definite points, especially useful for younger kids who may not be able to present rigorous solutions to section B questions.

I think it's going to be interesting to see how the Olympiad distribution of marks pans out this year as a result of the changes. The 2024 markers report has a frequency distribution and other info.

Mean 27, Median 26

Merit 20+ (A and B combined)
Dist 38+ (A and B combined)
Bronze 38+ (B only)
Silver 43+ (B only)
Gold 50+ (B only)

Assuming the old section A is generally easier than B even though I agree it's an inefficient use of time at least it gave entrants the opportunity to get some "easier" marks. That's gone now.

I wonder if in 2025, Merit level could be as low as 15? Dist maybe low 30s, and the averages in the low 20s? Medal levels largely unchanged?

Section A was always a bit of an anomaly in the JMO. None of the other math Olympiads (Cayley through BMO2 and, ultimately, IMO) have any answer-only questions, with the exception of the MOG in the last few years. UKMT have always shown that they care much more about generalizable solutions rather than specific answers which could be guess-and-checked or brute-forced, with the markers reports consistently stating that correct answers received very few points if not supported by fully justified reasoning. In the last few years, they've taken this to an extreme as they've placed literally zero weight on Section A in awarding medals.

My belief is that Section A served as a bridge between Challenge style questions (answer-only multiple-choice) and Olympiad style (full solutions required). The first time a child takes the JMO is usually the first time they see that type of question ("prove this statement" or "provide an answer and show why this answer alone is correct") requiring that type of solution. Section A existed to ensure that all candidates were able to make some progress and weren't left twiddling their thumbs for two hours. It seems that UKMT are no longer so concerned about that issue, with a recent markers report stating "Usually we would see many candidates attempt Section B in much the same way they attempt Section A, by this we mean that they find a correct answer but do not provide any written explanation to accompany it. For this paper this wasn’t generally the case and it appears that candidates are taking notice of the instructions on the front of the paper."

My guess is that UKMT will do something like they eventually did on the MOG: break the first couple of questions into parts that will lead more candidates towards a solution, or at least allow them to make some progress. However, since they're still allowing 2 hours for only 6 questions, I'd also guess that they will make the last couple of questions more difficult.

Both my children love the Olympiad type of question, sometimes for the same problem presenting different solutions to get to the same result. Practising Olympiad problem is also fun, sometimes it takes days and loads of revisit to be able to answer a question. It doesnt need as much repetitive practices as multiple choice type. So for the first round, my elder daughter often score high enough to get to the Olympiad but was not aiming for absolute mark. The fun begins at the Olympiad round for her.