Indian Talent Olympiad International Science Olympiad (ISO) Class 8: syllabus, dates and exam pattern (2026–27)

Indian Talent Olympiad publishes fifteen Class 8 science topics: Matter In Our Surroundings, Physical Quantities And Measurement, Light, Energy And Its Forms, Electricity, Biological Diversity, Soil And Agriculture, Human Health and Disease, Transport Of Food And Minerals In Plants, Reproduction In Plants And Animals, Ecosystem, Properties Of Substance, Chemical Reaction, Pollution, and Carbon And Its Compound. The count is the first thing worth noticing, and it does not do what you would expect. Class 6 is thirteen topics, Class 7 is seventeen, Class 8 is fifteen — the list grew and then shrank, while Section 1 stayed at 35 questions for all three classes. The list is not getting longer with the class; it is getting different. Eight of the fifteen land on a chapter of the 2026-27 Curiosity Class 8. Seven do not, and they are three different stories rather than one. Already in our Class 8 practice, though not in the book: Soil And Agriculture — crop production and management is one of the five entries in the curator taxonomy's Grade 8 Extra Topics bucket, and soil itself was Class 6's Nature's Treasures — and Physical Quantities And Measurement, which is also in that bucket, and whose school-book home is two years back, in Class 6's length-and-motion chapter and Class 7's time-and-motion one. Met last year, not in this year's book: Transport Of Food And Minerals In Plants is Class 7's Life Processes in Plants — xylem, phloem, transpiration and root absorption — and Chemical Reaction is Class 7's Changes Around Us, where chemical change, rusting and combustion live; the formal treatment with balanced equations is Class 10. And two that are genuinely ahead, in neither the school book nor our Class 8 material, which makes them the two to plan for: Energy And Its Forms is Class 9 — work, energy, power and simple machines, searched across every field of all five grade sheets and returning nothing at Class 8 — and Carbon And Its Compound is Class 10, a seven-topic chapter on covalent bonding, hydrocarbons and functional groups. The Class 8 book touches carbon only through compounds and formulae and through the carbon cycle, neither of which is carbon chemistry. Better known in August than in the hall. One of the seven splits down the middle: Reproduction In Plants And Animals — reproduction in animals is in the Grade 8 Extra Topics bucket and so is in our practice, while reproduction in flowering plants is a Class 9 chapter. Three chapters your child will study are on no ITO entry: the book's new opening chapter on investigation and inquiry, Exploring Forces, and Pressure, Winds, Storms and Cyclones. Neither forces nor pressure is on ITO's Class 7 list either — we re-read that list the same morning rather than assuming the material had simply moved a year. Chapter 11, Keeping Time with the Skies, is a fourth, and for a different reason: Indian Talent Olympiad runs astronomy as its own separate paper, ASO, so it is not missing from ISO so much as filed elsewhere. The sixteenth item on the paper, Logical Reasoning, is not a science chapter anywhere: it is the separate ten-question Section 2, and ITO names the same fifteen topics inside it at Class 8 as at Class 7. The chapter mapping above is ours, not ITO's: the body publishes topic names with no map to the new book.

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