UKMT Junior Mathematical Challenge.

An introduction

The first rung of the UKMT pyramid.

The Junior Mathematical Challenge is the entry-level paper in the UKMT's three-challenge pyramid. It is sat at school in a single sixty-minute sitting by Year 8 and below across the UK each spring. The questions are multiple choice (A–E), arranged in roughly increasing difficulty; questions 1–15 are worth five marks each, questions 16–25 are worth six. There is no negative marking, which makes the paper friendly to students new to competition mathematics.

Top performers are invited to the follow-on rounds: the Junior Kangaroo (a 60-minute, 25-question multiple-choice paper for UK schools) and the Junior Mathematical Olympiad (a two-hour, six-question long-form proof paper open to UK and overseas schools). Both are entered by invitation on a qualifying JMC score, and those qualifying marks are reset every year — recent Kangaroo and Olympiad thresholds have moved by twenty marks or more between cycles — so check the official awards page for this year's numbers rather than any fixed figure.

A note on follow-on rounds

The award-threshold history.

The UKMT publishes a full Award-Threshold History going back over two decades. The thresholds shift year on year — in 2025, for instance, the Junior Kangaroo cut-off sat at 100 and the Junior Mathematical Olympiad cut-off at 125, both well above some earlier years — but the broad shape is stable. Certificates go to roughly the top-scoring half of entrants, awarded as Bronze, Silver and Gold in a 3:2:1 ratio (about the top 25% bronze-and-up, with gold the top ~8%). Above that, the top scoring roughly 1,000–1,200 students qualify for the Junior Mathematical Olympiad, and the next band of around 10,000–15,000 (UK schools) for the Junior Kangaroo. Treat every threshold here as illustrative and verify against the official source for the current year.