National Level Science Talent Search Examination (NSTSE) Class 6: syllabus, dates and exam pattern (2026–27)

Three honest notes on this list. First, the strand tags above are ours, not Unified Council's: it publishes the 15/15/15/10/5 split but no map from chapters to physics, chemistry and biology — and the Class 6 Curiosity book is one integrated science book with no such divisions in it, so somebody has to draw the line. Ours is drawn against the body's own split so you can see which chapters feed which 15 marks. Second, a quarter of this paper is not science at all: 10 marks are mathematics from the Class 6 Ganita Prakash book, and 5 more are Critical Thinking. A child who revises only the science book has left 15 marks unprepared before the paper starts. Third, four topics that Class 6 olympiad papers still ask about are missing from the 2026-27 Curiosity book: light, shadows and reflections; electricity and simple circuits; fibre to fabric; and reversible versus irreversible changes. The first two are physics — the strand carrying 15 marks here — and both were chapters in the previous Class 6 NCERT. Three of the four moved up a year rather than disappearing: light with shadows and reflections, electricity with circuits, and reversible versus irreversible change are all Class 7 chapters in the 2026-27 spine. That is genuinely useful to know, because it means a Class 6 child sitting NSTSE is being asked next year's physics, and it is not something a Class 6 textbook or a Class 6 teacher will close. The fourth, fibre to fabric, has left the Classes 6 to 8 spine altogether. None of the four sits in our own Class 6 science practice today — the Grade 6 science taxonomy carries no olympiad-scope bucket at all, which is a real coverage gap on the class this site leads with.

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