Which olympiad should my Class 7 child take?

Almost every guide to choosing an olympiad compares exam patterns — question counts, marking schemes, how hard the reasoning section is. Those differences are real, and for most Class 7 families they are not what decides the answer. What decides it is a question nobody puts first: who is allowed to enter your child. For most of these exams it is not you.

Start with the route, not the exam

Olympiad bodies fall into two groups, and the group matters more than the syllabus. Some register students only through the school — the school signs up, collects fees, and sends one list. If your school does not run that exam, your child cannot sit it, however well suited they are. Others accept a registration directly from a parent. The second group is much smaller than most families expect, and it is the one to check first, because it is the only group where your decision is actually yours.

So the honest order is: find out what your school already runs, then fill the gaps from the direct routes, then — and only then — worry about which exam suits your child better. A perfect comparison between two papers your school does not offer is a wasted afternoon.

What can a Class 7 child actually sit?

Across the three bodies with Class 7 pages on this site, the subject coverage looks like this. Every date below is a first sitting: several of these papers run on two or three dates and your school picks one, so treat the date as "the earliest this could be" rather than a fixture.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on. Hindi appears once, and Social Science appears twice but from bodies that reach you differently. Both facts change what you should do next, and neither is visible if you start by comparing exam patterns.

Why do the registration deadlines feel so confusing?

Because the three bodies run on genuinely different clocks, and none of them is wrong. SOF has no single deadline at all: a school’s list has to reach SOF thirty days before whichever exam date that school picked, so the real cutoff is a different day for every school and for every paper. SilverZone publishes one fixed date covering every paper it runs — 30 September 2026 this year. Indian Talent Olympiad publishes named sets with their own dates, and has extended one of them twice this season.

This is why "the olympiad deadline" is a phrase worth distrusting. On 31 August 2026 three routes were due to close and only one of them did. If you were told the season had ended, it had not.

What if the school runs nothing?

Then you are down to the bodies that take a registration straight from a family, and you should know exactly which papers those cover before you plan around them. Indian Talent Olympiad’s individual online route is the widest door for a Class 7 child: it runs six papers, including Maths, Science and Social Studies. CREST also accepts direct entries. Unified Council runs its own online route, priced at Rs. 354 including GST.

What that route does not include is Hindi. It is an easy assumption to make — the body runs a Hindi paper through schools, so the individual route looks like it should carry one too. It does not, and planning a Hindi entry around it costs a family the paper.

Can I register my child for a Hindi olympiad myself?

Through one body, and we cannot currently confirm it is open. SOF’s Hindi paper (IHO) is school-route only. SilverZone and CREST do not run a Class 7 Hindi paper. Indian Talent Olympiad’s individual route does not include Hindi. That leaves Humming Bird, which has historically taken Hindi registrations directly from families — and whose site has been unreachable from every check we have run over several days, on multiple paths and DNS resolvers.

We are not going to tell you it is open, and we are not going to tell you it has closed. We cannot read the site, and an unreadable site is an unknown rather than a closure. If Hindi matters to your child this year, the reliable move is to ask your school whether it is running SOF’s IHO, because that is the route we can actually verify.

So which one should you pick?

If your school runs a paper in the subject your child is strongest at, take that one and stop optimising — the syllabus overlap between these bodies is large enough that preparation for any of them is preparation for all of them. If the school runs several, pick by exam date rather than by exam: two papers eight weeks apart are two real attempts, and two papers in the same fortnight are one attempt and one tired afternoon. If the school runs nothing, start from the direct routes above and accept that the subject list is shorter, which is a constraint rather than a failure.

And whatever you pick, the preparation gap is rarely knowledge. It is that olympiad questions ask about a chapter differently from the way school tests ask about it, and a child meets that difference for the first time in the exam hall. Twenty minutes most days on olympiad-pattern questions — started now rather than ten days before the paper — closes more of the gap than any choice between two bodies will.