Is there negative marking in SOF IEO Class 7?

SOF publishes a marks-awarded scheme only — 1 mark per question in the first three sections and 3 marks per question in the Achievers Section — and publishes no deduction for a wrong answer anywhere on its IEO pages. Check the instruction sheet on the official sample paper before the exam, and in the meantime attempt every question.

Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF) · English · Class 7

International English Olympiad (IEO) Class 7: 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 Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF)'s own site on 20 August 2026. Exam dates re-checked on 14 October 2026.

2026–27 exam dates

Date 1

30 September 2026

Date 2

27 October 2026

Date 3

17 November 2026

Registration: IEO is the earliest paper SOF runs all year, and that makes its first cutoff the tightest deadline on this site. Your school picks one of the three dates above; SOF's earliest sitting, 30 September, had a registration cutoff of 31 August 2026, which has now passed. Two options remain: 27 September if your school picks the 27 October sitting, or 18 October if it picks 17 November. Registration is through the school; SOF does not accept individual entries. Once the school has chosen a date it cannot be changed — ask your coordinator which of the two remaining dates it has gone with.

Free — deadline calendar

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

SOF IEO (English) — if your school picks 17 November 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 18 October 2026
SOF ISO (Science) — if your school picks 19 November 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 20 October 2026
Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) — School route — Set B (extended from 10 October)
Registration closes 22 October 2026
SOF IHO (Hindi) — if your school picks 23 November 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 24 October 2026
SOF IMO (Maths) — if your school picks 26 November 2026
Registrations must reach SOF by 27 October 2026

Get the full calendar on WhatsApp

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 14 October 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 IEO paper is structured

Section	Questions	Marks per question	Section total
Word and Structure Knowledge	30	1	30
Reading	10	1	10
Spoken and Written Expression	5	1	5
Achievers Section	5	3	15
Total	50 questions	—	60 marks · 60 minutes

SOF publishes this single table for Classes 5 to 12, so the Class 7 paper is the same shape as the Class 6 one and only the topic list underneath it moves. Word and Structure Knowledge is 30 of the 50 questions — half the paper is grammar and vocabulary with no reading in it — and the Achievers Section is 5 questions at 3 marks each, a tenth of the questions for a quarter of the marks, drawn from Sections 1 to 3 rather than from extra topics.

SOF publishes a current-class/previous-class split for IMO and ISO and publishes none for IEO, so nothing is claimed here. Do not carry the 60/40 figure across from the maths and science guides on this site — it is a statement SOF makes about those papers and not about this one.

Syllabus

English syllabus mapped to NCERT Poorvi (Class 7, 2026-27)

Ch 1. The Day the River Spoke

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary in context; literary devices and theme

Ch 2. Try Again

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry, theme and application

Ch 3. Three Days to See

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose

Ch 4. Animals, Birds, and Dr. Dolittle

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; literary devices

Ch 5. A Funny Man

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — wordplay and puns

Ch 6. Say the Right Thing

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; Spoken and Written Expression (M3)

Ch 7. My Brother's Great Invention

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; describing processes

Ch 8. Paper Boats

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry and poetic devices

Ch 9. North, South, East, West

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose and theme; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 10. The Tunnel

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose and setting; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 11. Travel

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry and theme

Ch 12. Conquering the Summit

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose and theme; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 13. A Homage to Our Brave Soldiers

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose and theme

Ch 14. My Dear Soldiers

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry

Ch 15. Rani Abbakka

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — biography; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

What SOF names for Class 7 moves up a level from Class 6 without dropping anything. Section 1, Word and Structure Knowledge, lists spellings, collocations, travel and location vocabulary, homonyms, homophones, synonyms, antonyms, analogies, phrasal verbs, idioms, modals, word order, parts of speech, tenses, voices and narration. Section 2, Reading, is information retrieval from news stories, brochures, formal and informal letters, advertisements, narratives, biographies, notices and messages — again mostly document formats a Class 7 English book does not contain. Section 3 is situation-based language: requests, refusals, apologies, preferences and expressing intent. Section 4 names no topics of its own; SOF states it is higher-order questions drawn from Sections 1 to 3. Now the part we would rather say than have you discover: our own Class 7 English practice is thinner on Section 1 than our Class 6 practice is, and Section 1 is half the paper. The curator taxonomy sheet Grade7_English carries 12 rows in its olympiad-scope bucket against Grade 6's 24, and the twelve are clause- and composition-level work — tenses, modals, voice, narration, phrases and clauses, conditionals, phrasal verbs, unseen passages, letter and dialogue writing, descriptive composition, figures of speech. Checked row by row across every field of that sheet, it carries no row for antonyms, idioms, spellings, analogies, homophones and homonyms, word order, punctuation, jumbled words, subject-verb agreement, or parts of speech as topics in their own right — and SOF names all of those for Class 7. Our Grade 6 sheet carries every one of them. So a Class 7 child preparing Section 1 with us today gets the sentence-level half and not the word-level half, and the honest advice is to work spellings, idioms, synonyms and antonyms from a word list alongside. This is a gap in our coverage, not in the paper, and it is logged for the curator team rather than left here.

Try it yourself

Today's english question

Practice

Practice in the IEO format

OlympAI has not published a practice paper for this exam yet. When one is ready, this page is where it will appear — nothing to sign up for and no phone number to hand over.

See what is on this paper

Frequently asked questions

It depends on which of the two remaining dates your school picks, because SOF publishes a rule rather than a date: registrations must reach SOF 30 days before the chosen exam date. SOF's earliest 2026-27 sitting, 30 September, had a cutoff of 31 August 2026 — the earliest SOF deadline of the season — which has now passed. If your school picks 27 October the cutoff is 27 September; if it picks 17 November it is 18 October. Ask your coordinator which of those two dates they have chosen, because that single answer is the only cutoff that applies to you now.

Not the paper. SOF publishes one pattern table for Classes 5 to 12 — 50 questions, 60 marks, 60 minutes, the same four sections in the same proportions. What changes is the topic list inside Section 1: Class 7 adds analogies, homonyms and homophones, word order, collocations and travel vocabulary on top of the Class 6 parts-of-speech and tense work, and Section 2 adds advertisements, biographies and notices to the document formats it asks a child to read.

Yes. IEO is one of only three SOF papers with a second level, alongside IMO and ISO, and Level 2 runs for Classes 3 to 12. SOF publishes three qualifying routes: the top 5% of students class-wise who sit Level 1, the top 25 rank holders per class in each zone, and the class topper at each participating school where at least 10 students from that class appear and score 50% or above. One caveat in SOF's own words: the second level "may be conducted based on the prevalent conditions", and if it is not held, Level 1 results are treated as final. Treat Level 2 as a possibility, never a promise.

No. SOF registers through participating schools only, for every paper it runs. If your school does not offer IEO, we have confirmed direct routes at CREST, Unified Council for its online sittings, Indian Talent Olympiad on its individual online route, and Humming Bird. SilverZone also runs a public individual registration form at r.silverzone.org alongside its default school route; which papers that form offers we have not been able to confirm, so ask SilverZone before ruling it out.

Still choosing

Every olympiad a Class 7 child can sit in 2026–27

All the papers at this class, grouped by whether your school has to enter your child or you can register directly — with each body's own dates and cutoffs.

Related guides

Other olympiad syllabus guides

Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF) · Class 6

IEO Class 6 — english syllabus, dates and pattern

Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF) · Class 8

IEO Class 8 — english syllabus, dates and pattern

Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) · Class 7

ITO-E Class 7 — english syllabus, dates and pattern

Indian Talent Olympiad (ITO) · Class 7

ITO-H Class 7 — hindi syllabus, dates and pattern

Keep reading

Guides that answer the next question

SOF IEO vs SilverZone iOEL: which English olympiad to pick

Both English olympiads give exactly half their marks to word and grammar knowledge, and exactly a quarter to a higher-order section. Where they part company is the other quarter: SOF IEO spends it on reading, SilverZone iOEL spends almost the same amount on writing and speaking instead. Here is the side-by-side for Classes 6, 7 and 8, the two registration dates that matter this week, and how to tell which paper suits your child.

SOF and SilverZone registration last dates 2026-27, explained for parents

Four school-route registration dates fell between 23 and 30 September 2026: if your school picked those sittings, SOF’s 30-day rule gave 23 September for a 23 October IMO, 27 September for a 27 October IEO and 30 September for a 30 October ISO, and SilverZone published 30 September 2026 for every paper — a date it has since moved to 31 October 2026. None of them is a form a parent fills in. Here is what each date means, what to ask the school, and where to go if the school is not entering your child.

Or see every 2026-27 exam date and registration cutoff in one table, or browse all the papers we cover.

Practice these exact chapters, free

3 practice quizzes a day in each subject free, 10 olympiad-pattern questions each, and 5 with your choice of length and difficulty on OlympAI PRO — for Class 7 english, generated from the same NCERT chapters above and written to the shape of the real olympiad papers, then automatically checked before they can be served, the hardest ones re-solved by a second model that has to agree.

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