SOF IMO preparation, taught live online: the four sections, the three dates, and what Level 2 actually takes.

Read that table and two things follow. First, this is a curriculum exam wearing an olympiad's name: the questions stay inside what the class has been taught, and the child who understands the term's topics well and can reason quickly under a clock will do well. Second, one section, the Achievers Section, is built to separate the top of the class from the rest, and it is the section almost nobody prepares for separately. Our batches are organised around those two facts.

The name deserves one paragraph of its own. SOF is the Science Olympiad Foundation, a private organisation based in Gurugram that runs eight olympiads and, by its own count, works with more than 99,000 schools in 72 countries. Its IMO is a mass-participation exam with awards down to participation level. The other IMO, the International Mathematical Olympiad, is a two-day proof exam between national teams, reached in India through IOQM, RMO and INMO. A search for "IMO preparation" mixes the two, and a family that buys the wrong preparation wastes a year. This page is about the SOF exam. Our Olympiad Mathematics course is about the other one.

1. A placement check in the first week, by class and board

   Twenty questions, four sections, at the child's class level, sat alone and then walked through together. It tells the teacher which section will earn the marks and which will lose them, and it tells you, honestly, where your child stands before any preparation. The plan for that student is written from it.

2. One section at a time, taught for the method

   Logical Reasoning first, because it is off the school syllabus and pays back fastest. Then Mathematical Reasoning on the topics the class is studying that term, then Everyday Mathematics as a reading skill. Each session ends with a short set the student does alone, marked before the next class, so every week starts with something the student produced.

3. The Achievers Section gets its own block every week

   From the first month, not the last. A small number of hard questions, attempted with a clock, then discussed: which ones to attempt, which to leave, how to come back. By the exam the section that frightens most children is the one ours have seen most often.

4. Timed papers in the exact shape of the real one

   The same four sections, the same question count for the class, the same 60 minutes, on questions the teacher wrote. We do not reproduce SOF's papers; we point you to SOF's own sample papers for the official look, and we practise on ours because the real paper is never the one you rehearsed. Every mock is reviewed question by question the next class.

5. A Level 2 track for the students who qualify

   Qualification comes by three routes, and the school-topper route in particular is reachable for a strong student at a school with a full class entry. Students who qualify move to a shorter, harder block aimed at the second round, and the students who narrowly miss carry on with their base maths course, which was the point all along.

Timings are after-school and weekend slots in Indian Standard Time, fixed on the call once we know the class band and your school's date, so a Class 3 batch is never asked to sit at a Class 9 hour. Families abroad on the same syllabus join the same batches; the fee for families outside India is shown in your own currency on this page.