Your child sat the Junior Maths Challenge at school in the spring. The paper came home in a bag, or it did not, and either way nothing was done with it. Typing in the 25 letters they chose takes a couple of minutes and turns that morning into a clinic full of named mistakes — without spending an hour re-sitting a paper they have already done. It is the fastest route into the room, and the one most families should start with.

The tile is on the main screen of the Maths Challenge room: Sat one at school? → Type your answers. Its own description is the whole feature in two lines:

Sat a paper at school? Put your 25 letters in and every wrong one goes to the clinic with its name. Leave a blank blank.

Why this beats re-sitting the paper

Sitting a past paper under the clock is a good thing to do and the room supports it properly — 25 questions, 60 minutes, autosave, a five-minute warning. But it costs an hour, and if the paper in question is one your child has already sat at school, that hour buys you a slightly stale repeat of a sitting you already have the data from.

Re-sitting it Typing it in
An hour under a clock A couple of minutes
A second sitting of a paper they half-remember The sitting that actually happened, at school
Mixed evidence — how much was recall? Clean evidence from the real attempt
Fills the clinic Fills the clinic

The last row is the point. Both routes end in exactly the same place: every wrong answer filed under a named mistake with a count, ready to work. One of them costs an hour.

For papers your child has not sat, do the opposite — sit it under the clock, because then the timing is genuine information too.

Picking the paper

First, the switch at the top of the room: Junior or Intermediate. The note underneath is the rule of thumb — Junior: Year 8 & below · Intermediate: Year 9–11. It defaults to your child's school year, and an explicit choice is remembered. If you are unsure which one they sat, Junior or Intermediate walks through it.

Then pick the year. Twelve past papers are loaded for each competition, covering 2015 to 2026, so a paper sat at school in recent years will almost certainly be there.

Leaving a blank blank

This is the instruction we would most like families to take seriously. Enter 25 letters, and use — for any question your child left blank or genuinely cannot remember.

The temptation is to fill the gaps with a plausible guess so the entry looks complete. Do not. A guessed letter that happens to be wrong creates a named mistake your child never made, and that entry then sits in the clinic collecting practice time it does not deserve. A dash creates nothing and costs nothing.

There is a second reason, and it turns on which paper your child sat. A blank always scores 0. A wrong answer costs 1 or 2 marks on the back ten questions of every Intermediate paper, and of the Junior papers from 2015 to 2019; only Junior papers from 2020 onwards carry no penalty at all. Entering a truthful record of where your child left gaps is the only way that difference shows up honestly.

The mark, and what comes after it

Press Mark it and you get a plain line:

{marks} on the JMC {year} paper.

Then a single onward step: Take the wrong ones to the clinic.

Notice what does not appear. No certificate prediction, no band, no "this would have been a Silver". Of the 24 loaded papers only one has published grade boundaries at all, and where boundaries are absent the mark bar draws no tick row — not a greyed one, not an approximated one. We would rather show your child a number than a guess dressed as a verdict. The reasoning is set out in full in why we don't tell you it was a Gold.

What you do get is the thing worth having: every wrong answer, filed by the mistake it points to rather than by question number, with a count that grows as the same error turns up in other papers.

One entry per paper

Each paper can be entered once. Try a second time and the room says so: "You've already entered the JMC 2019 paper."

That is not tidiness for its own sake. The clinic's counts are its only real currency — a ×4 is meant to mean four distinct occasions on which this went wrong. If one sitting could be entered twice, every count would silently inflate, and the list would stop pointing at the right thing.

A sensible first evening

  1. Find out which paper they sat. The competition and the year is all you need; form tutors and maths teachers usually know.
  2. Get the 25 letters however you can. The marked paper is best. Their memory of it is fine.
  3. Type it in, dashes and all. Two minutes.
  4. Open the clinic and read the names. Not to fix anything yet — just to see which mistake carries the biggest count.
  5. Take that one, and only that one, to Professor Pi. Then let the re-trap arrive about a week later; that is what actually moves it.

If your child is sitting the Challenge again this year, it is also worth setting it as an exam so their maths cards come round sooner and the last one lands before the day.

FAQ

My child cannot remember every answer. Can they still enter the paper?

Yes. The instruction on the page is to leave a blank blank — there is a dash for any question they did not answer or cannot recall. A partial entry still files every wrong answer they can remember under its named mistake, which is the point of the exercise.

Can we enter the same paper twice?

No. It is one entry per paper, and the room will tell you: you've already entered that year's paper. That keeps the counts in the clinic honest — a mistake counted twice from a single sitting would misrepresent how often it actually happens.

Do we need the question paper itself?

You need to know which competition and which year it was, and the 25 letters your child chose. The room holds the papers, so it does the marking. Whatever comes home from school — the paper, a photo of it, or your child's memory of it — is what you are working from.

Duke Harewood built aitutors.me for his own KS3-aged daughter. This feature exists because her Junior Challenge paper sat in a school bag for four months, and everything useful in it was still there when we finally typed it in. Updated 10 September 2026.