Your single point for all information about Olympiad

Olympiad is a competitive examination for children of school grades 1 to 12, conducted by various examination organisations in India and abroad. Olympiad exams are way tougher than school syllabus and MCQ(multiple choice question) types. The time is also limited within which the student has to answer it correctly.

Olympiad exam companies are government and private and almost each one of them have websites where you can register.

There are plenty numbers of companies who conduct this exam and each year new companies join. So, the exact number is difficult to gaze.

Due to progress in the technology, many companies have given both options. Some are purely offline and some are purely online too.

The companies conduct competitions for different subjects. Most of them conduct Maths, Science and English. There are GK (general knowledge), Cyber, Reasoning, Social studies, Astronomy and even commerce. Some companies conduct language olympiads for both Indian and foreign languages.

Competitive exams start from Nursery. However, the most popular Olympiad called SOF starts from Grade 1.

Generally participation fee is low in Indian olympiad competitions- a couple of hundred rupees max. Some competitions are free as well. Every company has different ways of receiving competition fee. Mostly accepted online from their portals; some ask for schools to collect it from parent etc. 

You need to be careful before paying the fee and only pay the trusted website or follow instructions from the school authorities.

It is s a very important question. Most people in India know about SOF exams only, which starts from September and continue till December, sometimes January. They have one or two subjects in a month and spreads the exam dates throughout 4-5 months. Interesting part is, SOF conducts the exams when the students haven't learnt the chapters in schools yet, which makes the competition tough and interesting. Students who are fast learners and ahead in the class subjects can only manage to do good in the SOF competition.

Many competitions happen in winters and continue till summer and those are good as well. Sometimes even way tougher than SOF. For example, Crest, Unicus, Mental Maths, IPM, Silverzone etc are amongst other popular ones and no less than each other.

all online Olympiads allow students to participate from abroad. SOF being a physical exam format only, where children can participate only via their schools and not independently (as of 2023) also conduct exams abroad via schools there. But, the important matter is, the school should be interested in conducting such activity because there is a lot of administrative functionalities that they need to handle. Schools who believe that Olympiad will benefit their students are happy to do it for SOF. 

As the per SOF website, "During the academic year 2022-23, over 70000 schools from more than 1400 cities registered and millions of students appeared for the seven Olympiad exams. These Olympiads were conducted across 70 countries." 

Olympiad teaching is not the same as school book teaching. The syllabus and content-type is completely different. To teach at home, parents should first get hold of the syllabus, buy books available in the market and practice at home.

However, though it seems possible at the lower grades, higher grades automatically choose the real brainy ones because the going gets tough.

More question papers and more practice make a child more ready for the final assessment and the competition is tough.

homeClass has published Olympiad syllabus of class 1 to class 8 here.

Though for some reason, parents tend to believe that 2-3 months is enough for learning, it is absolutely incorrect. A syllabus tougher and wider than school which requires special training to beat the time and still get a perfect score can never be acquired fast. Like in sports or music, there has to be dedication and time devoted, even Olympiad, which is the peak achievement for an academic student, many years of studies and practices can only make things favourable. It requires the full year's hard work and focus and not just a casual crash course.

Different Olympiads offer different prizes. Medals, certificates and even cash prize money is there for the highest level toppers. 

Now, when the sports Olympic competition medals are not pure gold, how could olympiads be?

However, the amount spent by the Olympiad competition organisers on prize money etc. is noteworthy. As per SOF website- "For the 7 SOF Olympiad exams conducted during 2022-23, based on participation, value of awards/scholarships/felicitations was approx Rs 20 crores."

You can read here to know more on this query.

Please read here when you SHOULD NOT make your child participate in Olympiads. 

Apparently, nothing happens in his/her daily routined life. But if your child has to follow the academic route to score in his future profession, then the history of olympiad exams and results may help those who do s=well. Some universities have seats of students who fare will in Olympiad exams. There are examples of homeschooled children being accepted by most prestigious colleges like MIT and IIT though they never had any school passing certificates. Based on their Olympiad performance and admission tests and interviews they have got through! Isn't that amazing?

We can safely say the SOF is the most popular and biggest in terms of participation, in India. You can start with this and a couple more to understand the difficulty levels and then suit yourself in terms of participations.

We have mentioned in the previous sets of question that only one Indian Olympiad sees millions of students participating. You can very well imagine how many more participations are there worldwide.

Children of the entire world who want to achieve any academic goal must try and win medals in Olympiads. 

A six-student team represented India and secured six medals – 

Two gold, two silver and two bronze at the 64th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2023) held at Chiba, Japan from 02-13July, 2023. The team finished ninth among the 112 countries that participated in the competition, which is prestigious.