How to use a sample paper with your child without turning it into a test

A practice paper can do two completely different jobs in a house. It can show a child what an unfamiliar exam looks like, which is useful and takes about an hour. Or it can become a verdict delivered at the kitchen table, which is not useful and lasts a great deal longer than an hour. The difference is almost entirely in what the adult does in the twenty minutes after the paper, not in the hour during it.

Should the first paper be timed?

Decide it on purpose rather than by default, because the two versions answer different questions. A timed attempt answers: can my child finish this paper in the time the body gives? An untimed attempt answers: can my child do these questions at all, with room to think? A first paper run against a clock, on a format the child has never seen, mostly measures the format. If you are only going to run one, run the untimed one first and keep the clock for a later attempt, once the shape of the paper is familiar. OlympAI’s papers work either way: on screen a clock runs and the paper submits itself when the time is up, and printed it does not.

Is a first attempt score a prediction?

No. It measures one child, on one afternoon, on one set of questions, in a format they may never have met. It is a reading of today, and it is not evidence about an exam that has not happened. Treat it as a list of topics to look at rather than a number to react to — and think twice before saying the number out loud at all, because once a figure has been spoken it becomes the thing the paper was about. There is a structural reason the number misleads on olympiad papers in particular: the Achievers-style section is worth three marks a question, so two careless marks there move a total more than five marks anywhere else on the paper.

What should I do with a wrong answer?

Ask one question before you say anything else: what was this question asking you to do? Wrong answers on an olympiad paper fall into four piles, and only one of them is a gap in the syllabus. The child misread the question. The child knew the idea and slipped in the arithmetic. The child ran out of time and guessed. Or the child has genuinely not met the topic. Four piles, four different responses — and the mark on the page tells you nothing about which pile an answer is in. You find that out by asking the child, not by marking harder.

• Misread. Have the child read the question back in their own words. If the restatement is right, the maths was never the problem.
• Slipped. Ask them to redo only the step they think went wrong, not the whole question. This is the pile that feels worst and matters least.
• Ran out of time. Note it and move on. Time is a separate problem from topics, and mixing the two is how an afternoon goes sideways.
• Not met it yet. Write the chapter down. This is the only pile that is actually about the syllabus, and usually it is the smallest of the four.

What if my child gets most of the paper wrong?

Then the paper did its job early, and the useful move is to stop rather than to finish. These are olympiad papers, pitched above the school exam deliberately, and a child meeting one for the first time is usually meeting an unfamiliar format as much as unfamiliar content. Put it away, pick the two or three chapters the questions clustered in, and come back to the format another day. A paper abandoned halfway with the reason understood is worth more than a paper finished in tears.

When should we stop?

At the first of three things: the time is up, the child asks to stop, or you notice yourself explaining rather than asking. The third is the one that creeps up on a parent. The moment the session turns into a lesson being delivered, the paper has stopped being a reading of what the child can do and started being a reading of how well you teach. Stop there. The paper is still there tomorrow, and so is the second set.

Which paper should we start with?

The subject your child is actually entered for, at their own class. OlympAI publishes papers in maths and science for Classes 6, 7 and 8 — there is no English paper, and no Hindi or social-science paper either, so those subjects are not a starting point we can offer. For a Class 7 child the two starting points are the SOF IMO paper in maths and the SOF NSO paper in science. Each comes in two sets, so a second sitting a few weeks later is a different paper rather than a half-remembered one.

What can a practice paper not tell you?

Whether your child will qualify, where they might place, or how they will do on the day. A practice attempt is not evidence about any of those, and we make no claim about them. What it can tell you is narrower and more useful: which chapters came up that your child has not met, whether time was the constraint rather than knowledge, and whether the three-mark questions are within reach or still out of range. Those three answers are enough to decide what to do next, which is the only decision the paper was ever going to help with.

The figures and the behaviour described here were checked on the live papers on 2 October 2026. What is on each paper, section by section, is set out on our exam guides and in the companion post on the SOF IMO Class 7 pattern.