Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) · Hindi · Class 8
Indian Talent Olympiad National Hindi Olympiad (NHO) Class 8: syllabus, dates and exam pattern (2026–27)
Everything you need in one place — the exact NCERT chapters this paper tests, its published exam dates, the registration window, and the full marking scheme. Updated for the 2026–27 session.
Last verified against Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO)'s own site on 28 September 2026. Exam dates re-checked on 28 September 2026.
2026–27 exam dates
Through school — Set A
1 October 2026
Through school — Set B
25 November 2026
Through school — Set C
7 January 2027
Three dates, and they are Sets rather than attempts: the school picks one Set for Hindi and the whole class sits it together, and Indian Talent Olympiad states that once a Slot is selected it cannot be changed and that a school may choose only one Slot per subject. Read the pairing carefully, because it is the thing parents get wrong on this body: each Set has its own registration deadline months before its exam date, and Set A's registration closed on 10 September 2026 while its exam date falls three weeks later, on 1 October 2026. A date on this row being later than the day you read it does not mean that Set can still be entered — the deadline decides that, not the exam date. Only Sets B and C can, and the dates above are the body's own, read off its offline schedule page.
Registration: Through the school, and only through the school. Registration closes on three published dates — 10 September 2026 for Set A, 10 October 2026 for Set B and 10 November 2026 for Set C — and Set A has already closed. That one moved twice before it did: it read 31 August 2026 until 1 September, then 5 September, and Indian Talent Olympiad extended it to 10 September on 5 September itself, each time on the morning the old date was due to close and neither time with an announcement. The school collects ₹175 per student per subject, keeps ₹25 towards organising and supervising the exam and sends ₹150 to Indian Talent Olympiad. Read the deadline as a postal one rather than a form-filling one: the body's fee page requires the completed Registration Form, the Student List and the fee as a demand draft payable at Mumbai to reach its Vikhroli office on or before the cutoff, by registered post or courier, with NEFT, RTGS and cash deposit offered as alternatives to the draft. A child who qualifies for Round 2 pays a further ₹100. One caution about which of ITO's own pages to trust on Set A: its schedule page reads "Extended Till 10th September, 2026", while its fee page and its dedicated Last Date of Olympiad Registration page both still read 31st August 2026 — the pre-extension date, on the page whose whole subject is the deadline. All three agree on Set B at 10 October and on Set C at 10 November, and the schedule page is the surface that has carried every correction, so it is the one to trust where they differ.
The deadline is set by your school, not by you
Most parents find the exam date and assume they have until then. The registration window closes long before it, and for some papers it has already started closing. Here is how it actually works.
- Your school registers your child and your school picks which of the 2–3 dates the class sits. The family does not choose.
- For SOF papers, registrations must reach SOF exactly 30 days before that chosen date — and once the school has chosen, the date cannot be changed.
- Most bodies register through the school. These do not have to: CREST (online, no published cutoff), Unified Council — directly for NSTSE itself at ₹350 against ₹150 through a school, and on three online sittings, NSTSE-Online, UIMO-Online and UIEO-Online, at ₹354 each including GST — Indian Talent Olympiad on its individual online route (its own later dates — Slot 1 closes 30 October), and Humming Bird (online, ₹150 a subject, no published cutoff — its two dates are picked as you register). CREST is the simplest of them. SilverZone also runs an individual registration form alongside its default school route; which papers it offers we have not been able to confirm.
Closing next
SilverZone Foundation — Every SilverZone paper
Registration closes 30 September 2026
The body publishes this date but has not marked it final — confirm with your school before treating it as fixed.
SOF ISO (Science) — if your school picks 30 October 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 30 September 2026
Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) — School route — Set B
Registration closes 10 October 2026
SOF IEO (English) — if your school picks 17 November 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 18 October 2026
SOF IHO (Hindi) — if your school picks 23 November 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 24 October 2026
Or read the full calendar on the site — no sign-up
Every deadline in this box was re-read against the exam body's own website on or after 28 September 2026. Each table carries its own source link and its own date. Bodies do move dates, so check against the body's own site before you act on one.
Exam pattern
How the ITO-H paper is structured
| Section | Questions | Marks per question | Section total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Section 1 — Subjective (syllabus) | 35 | 1 | 35 |
| Section 2 — Logical Reasoning | 10 | 1 | 10 |
| Section 3 — Higher Order Thinking (HOTs) | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| Total | 50 questions | — | 50 marks · 65 minutes |
Two things about this table are worth knowing before a child prepares for it, and the first is that only 35 of the 50 questions are Hindi at all. Section 2 is ten logical-reasoning questions drawn from no Hindi book, and Section 3 is five higher-order questions which the body states are drawn from Section 1 — so the syllabus below accounts for 40 of the 50 marks and reasoning for the other 10. Second, every question carries one mark, the Achievers-style weighting that SOF and SilverZone both use is absent here, and the paper is therefore not tilted towards its harder end: a HOTs question is worth exactly what a vocabulary question is worth. The 65 minutes is the school route, which is the only route this paper has — Indian Talent Olympiad gives its individual online papers 45 minutes for the same 50 questions, and Hindi is not among the papers that route offers, so that figure does not apply here. Indian Talent Olympiad publishes no negative-marking rule and no marking scheme beyond the one mark per question shown above; it also states that the pattern is identical for every subject it runs except Drawing and Essay.
All 50 questions carry one mark, including the five Higher Order Thinking questions, so the paper is not weighted towards its harder end. Section 2's ten reasoning questions are a fifth of the marks and come from no Hindi book at all — Indian Talent Olympiad publishes them as a fourteen-chapter list of its own, under its National Logical Reasoning Olympiad, and the list is class-specific. At Class 8 the fourteen are series completion and inserting the missing character, alpha-numeric sequence, analogy and classification, coding-decoding, blood relations, direction sense test, logical Venn diagrams, puzzle, mathematical operations, analytical reasoning, mirror and water images, embedded figures and figure formation, construction of squares with ranking, and figure matrix. Against Class 7 that restores series completion and alpha-numeric sequence, which the Class 7 list omits, and against Class 6 it replaces cubes and dice with construction of squares. Indian Talent Olympiad publishes no current-class versus previous-class split for any of its papers, so none is claimed here.
Syllabus
Hindi syllabus mapped to NCERT Malhar (Class 8, 2026-27)
Ch 1. स्वदेश (कविता) — गयाप्रसाद शुक्ल 'सनेही'
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named on ITO's Class 8 list — feeds the unseen poetry passage item as practice only
Ch 2. दो गौरैया (कहानी) — भीष्म साहनी
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — feeds गद्यांश reading, which the paper asks for as अपठित prose
Ch 3. एक आशीर्वाद (कविता) — दुष्यंत कुमार
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — feeds अलंकार recognition, which ITO does list at this class as figures of speech
Ch 4. हरिद्वार (पत्र) — भारतेंदु हरिश्चंद्र
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — औपचारिक पत्र-लेखन is composition, and NHO is 50 multiple-choice questions
Ch 5. कबीर के दोहे
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — its सधुक्कड़ी भाषा work feeds वर्ण-विचार and vocabulary; ITO names no poet at any class
Ch 6. एक टोकरी भर मिट्टी (कहानी) — माधवराव सप्रे
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — feeds गद्यांश reading
Ch 7. मत बाँधो (कविता) — महादेवी वर्मा
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — feeds प्रतीक and अलंकार, so it reaches the figures-of-speech item indirectly
Ch 8. नए मेहमान (एकांकी) — उदयशंकर भट्ट
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — एकांकी-लेखन is composition; the form itself is never asked about
Ch 9. आदमी का अनुपात (कविता) — गिरिजा कुमार माथुर
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — feeds पद-बोध
Ch 10. तरुण के स्वप्न (उद्बोधन) — सुभाषचंद्र बोस
Olympiad syllabus label: Not named — भाषण-लेखन is composition, and an उद्बोधन is a prose form the paper never names
Third class, same answer: Indian Talent Olympiad names not one Malhar chapter for NHO Class 8. Its published Class 8 list, quoted from its own page, is language, script, grammar concepts, word formation, prefixes and suffixes, compound words, nouns, gender, singular and plural, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and tenses, synonyms, antonyms, words with multiple meanings, homophones, sentence construction, punctuation, error correction, idioms, proverbs, figures of speech, and comprehension with unseen prose and poetry passages. Two items are new against Class 7 and both are the kind that catch a child out: compound words, which is समास named for the first time, and figures of speech, which is अलंकार. Counted against the curator taxonomy sheet Grade8_Hindi: of its 42 topic rows, only two sit on a Malhar chapter — सधुक्कड़ी भाषा on chapter 5 and the rest of the literature rows being whole-chapter analysis — and 28 grammar and word-knowledge rows sit in chapter 99, व्याकरण — ओलंपियाड. This is the class where our coverage of ITO's list is at its best: language and script as भाषा, बोली व लिपि; grammar concepts as वर्ण-विचार; word formation as शब्द-विचार; prefixes and suffixes as उपसर्ग-प्रत्यय; compound words as समास, with संधि-विस्तार beside it; nouns as संज्ञा; gender as लिंग; singular and plural as वचन; pronouns as सर्वनाम; adjectives as विशेषण; verbs and tenses as क्रिया and काल; synonyms as पर्यायवाची, with भ्रामक पर्यायवाची beside it; antonyms as विलोम; words with multiple meanings and homophones as अनेकार्थी व श्रुतिसमभिन्नार्थक शब्द; sentence construction as वाक्य के भेद, with पद-परिचय and पदबंध beside it; punctuation as विराम-चिह्न; error correction as अशुद्धि-शोधन; idioms and proverbs as मुहावरे व लोकोक्तियाँ; and figures of speech as अलंकार. We also carry एक-शब्द प्रतिस्थापन, which ITO drops from its Class 8 list having asked for it at Classes 6 and 7. Two gaps we do not claim: word pairs, which has no row on the Grade 6, 7 or 8 sheet and which ITO asks for only at Class 6; and अपठित passages as a skill of their own, because our comprehension rows are anchored to chapters a child has already read. Running the other way, one row of ours is not on ITO's Class 8 list: वाच्य. Keeping it is our call, not the body's.
Try it yourself
Today's hindi question
Practice
Practice in the ITO-H format
No — OlympAI does not publish a practice paper for this exam. OlympAI’s question bank covers maths, science and English. We hold no Hindi questions yet, so there is no Hindi paper to give you — for this body or any other.
Frequently asked questions
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Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) · Class 7
ITO-H Class 7 — hindi syllabus, dates and pattern
Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) · Class 8
ITO-S Class 8 — science syllabus, dates and pattern
SilverZone Foundation · Class 8
ABHO Class 8 — hindi syllabus, dates and pattern
Keep reading
Guides that answer the next question
The registration deadline has passed — can my child still sit an olympiad?
A closed olympiad deadline is almost never the season closing. Of the three routes due to close on 31 August 2026, only SOF’s actually did — SilverZone moved its cutoff to 30 September and Indian Talent Olympiad extended Set A twice, to 10 September. Twelve of SOF’s thirteen sittings in Maths, Science, English, Hindi and Social Science were never on that clock at all, and some bodies take a registration straight from a family. Here is what is still open, subject by subject, with the date each route closes on.
Your child qualified for Level 2 — what that actually means
Level 2 means four different things at four different olympiad bodies. At CREST it is the top 55.56% of the class. At SOF it is roughly the top 5%. Here is each body’s published rule, the score it took at SOF last year for Classes 6 to 8, and the two things SOF says about Level 2 that most parents never see.
Or see every 2026-27 exam date and registration cutoff in one table, or browse all the papers we cover.
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