News: UK Mathematical Olympiad for Girls (31 August 2013, updated 5 September 2013)

UK MOG, to be held on Thursday 26 September, is aimed at girls in Years 11, 12 and 13 who enjoy challenging maths problems. Younger girls may also enter, but you should note that some questions may require topics from the GCSE syllabus. The main aim of this competition is to introduce students to maths olympiad style problems. Those who find that they enjoy them can then join one of the UKMT mentoring schemes and enter further competitions.

This year, UK MOG will be held at the end of September, in order to allow us to identify students who would benefit from further training. The team for the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad (EGMO) will be selected in February based on BMO1 and BMO2 results.

Because the main purpose of the competition is to give students a taste of maths olympiads, the format of the paper will be different from previous years. Some questions will be in two parts: part (b) will be the main problem, carrying the majority of marks; part (a) will ask students to prove a result that should help them solve the main problem—it could be an easier version, or a related problem, or a preliminary result that will be needed in the main proof. (For those familiar with them, this is similar to some STEP questions, where question parts are of increasing difficulty but use the same idea.) It is hoped that the new format will help those students who are not familiar with common olympiad “tricks”.

UK MOG will be a 2½-hour paper with five problems.

As this paper will follow a new format, there are no past papers in this format. However, the difficulty of the questions will be similar to the Intermediate Olympiad Maclaurin paper.

To register your student for UK MOG 2013, please contact enquiry@ukmt.org.uk with the following information: student full name, date of birth, school year, school name, UKMT centre number, and confirmation of student eligibility (either eligible for a UK passport describing them as a British Citizen, or will have completed 3 full years of full-time secondary education in the UK by the time they leave school). Your registration will be acknowledged and the paper will be sent by email to the contact teacher on Tuesday 24 September for the paper to be sat on Thursday 26 September.

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