Welcome to the Junior Mathematics Competition!
- Due to unforeseen reasons there may be a delay in sending invoices to schools. We hope to have these sent out by the end of this week. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
- The questions and model solutions for this year's part one have now been made available on the Previous Questions page.
This year the competition (initialled as UOJMC) will be held in two parts - the first being a multiple-choice exam, while the second part will be a long answer exam limited to a selection of the top performers in the first part. Both parts are paper based.
The first part of the competition will be sat from Monday March 23 to Friday March 27, while the second part will be held on Wednesday May 6.
2026 is the 41st year of this highly successful Competition.
This mathematics competition is for students in Years 9 to 12, although younger students may also take part.
Each part of the competition lasts for 50 minutes per part (so one hour, 40 minutes in total across the two parts). The emphasis is on problem solving, so expect surprises!
Mathematical skills are important, but so is careful reading. Students who read the questions carefully and work out exactly what is being asked generally do better than those who jump in and write down the first thing that springs to mind.
Although many of the same questions are asked for each year level, students only compete against students at the same level as themselves. (However students in years 7 or 8 are regarded as being in year 9 for the purposes of the competition.)
Full details of the competition may be found here, with a note on who can enter here.
News
We have now emailed entered schools with the resources needed to sit the first part of the competition. If your school has entered the competition and have not received your resources, please contact us at jmc.maths@otago.ac.nz as soon as possible.
Entries for schools that entered last year (and other schools who have least enquired about entering) will still be accepted until 5pm this Friday.
We've created a poster for schools to advertise the competition. You can find it here.
We intend to send initial invitation letters to schools on Tuesday February 10.
We're now planning to run the second part of the 2026 competition on Wednesday, the 6th of May. (Schools may sit on the 7th or 8th of May without losing eligibility for cash prizes if we are informed beforehand.) The first part of the 2026 competition is still scheduled for the week starting the 23rd of March.
The date for the second part of the second competition is still provisional - let us know as soon as possible if it doesn't suit.
Due to logistical delays we will now send out prize packs next week. Out apologies for this.
Final results have been sent to schools. We hope to send physical prize packs out next week.
We will also upload this year's questions and model solutions, as well as the school report, in the near future.
Preliminary results have now been emailed to schools. If your school has not received such an email let us know.
The website will be updated with the Top 30 results in early October.
Note: we are not in a position to provide results to individual students. Students wishing to know their results must contact their schools.
We now expect results to come out in mid September.
We now expect results to be released in late August, rather than early August as originally planned. Our apologies for the delay.
We plan to send out invoices to schools for their entries over the next few weeks - this will be done in order of marking for the most part.
A reminder that these will be sent to the email address associated with the account set up at the University; this will not be your school's competition contact address in most cases.
If you wish to be invoiced in the first batch, please let us know; we will confirm the number of entries we have for your school before sending your school the invoice.
Also let us know if your school requires a purchase order number assigned by your school's financial system to be included. Some of you have already done so.
Entries for this year's competition will no longer be accepted, unless you have already contacted us regarding entering.
We've now emailed entered schools with the resources needed to run the competition. If your school entered the competition and you did not receive an email from us yesterday with the questions and other files, please contact us as soon as possible.
We have also extended the deadline for entries to 12pm on Monday, May 5.
We are pleased to announce that the competition will go ahead next year.
The provisional date for next year's competition is:
Wednesday, the 7th of May 2025.
The competition next year will be a paper only competition. The format of next year's competition is a one off due to a variety of factors, and it is anticipated that future competitions will likely return to a two part structure.
Note that the date is subject to change at this point in time, but the final date will be on a Wednesday early in Term 2. The final date will be included in the Initial Invitation to schools that will be sent out in early February.
We're still working through some logistical issues that may prevent us from running the competition next year. This means we don't have any dates for a potential competition as yet.
We do hope to have a firm decision made by the end of next week. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
Due to technical issues final results will not be released until Thursday August 21 at the earliest. Our apologies.
The Top 30 results for each year level are now available on the results page.
We hope to have preliminary results available starting next week. In the first instance the Top 30 prize winners (including first, second, and third in each year level) will be published on our results page. Digital certificates and full results will follow.
Note that physical certificates are still a few weeks away as we need to confirm the names and year levels for every student before we can print any certificates.
We have migrated to a new website. Please contact us if you encounter any issues while navigating our new site.
Update on marking: The primary marking of this year's competition has finished. Check marking of the top 20% or so of papers is well under way. We intend to get results out to schools in the middle of August.