JMC, IMC, BMO: How Professor Abel Structures Competition Maths Prep

The UKMT competitions are the closest thing to a national pipeline for mathematical talent in the UK. The Junior Maths Challenge sits at the entry point. The Intermediate sits one tier up. The British Mathematical Olympiad is where the serious work starts. Professor Abel covers all three, calibrated to where the student is.

This article is the structure — the actual six-week plan, the past papers, the mock conditions, the sequencing. If you've read Meet Professor Abel and want to know what the prep concretely looks like, this is it.

The competitions, briefly

For most KS3 students, JMC is the realistic target. IMC enters the frame in Year 9. BMO is rare and exceptional — Abel can prepare for it but only with a student who has shown strong IMC results and genuine appetite.

The scoring rules — and why they shape everything

The JMC pays for correct answers and charges for some wrong ones. The structure:

This produces a counterintuitive tactical reality: a student who gets Q1-15 all right (75 points) and skips everything else still scores around Silver level. Attempting Q16-25 only helps if the success rate is meaningfully above guessing.

Abel makes this scoring strategy the first thing taught in any competition prep, even before any actual problem practice. It changes how the student reads the paper.

The six-week countdown

This is the spine of Abel's prep. Six weeks, one to two sessions per week, 15-25 minutes each.

Week 1 — Foundations and Assessment

The first two sessions are diagnostic. Abel runs the student through five mixed JMC problems (untimed) to see which categories they're naturally strong in and which need work. KS3 students typically come in strong on number and algebra, weaker on geometry and combinatorics.

The output is a personalised five-week plan. Specifically: which categories will get extra attention, which competition strategies are already instinctive, which are missing.

Week 2 — Core Strategies

The two universally useful strategies. Process of elimination (it's multiple choice — sometimes you can eliminate to one answer without solving). Working backwards (test the answer choices against the question; sometimes faster than algebra).

Problems chosen specifically because the elimination/backwards approach is dramatically faster than the brute-force route. The student gets the visceral experience of "oh — this is what competition maths is". That moment is worth more than ten lectures.

Week 3 — Category Deep Dives

The weakest two categories from Week 1. For most students this is geometry and combinatorics. Abel teaches angle-chasing, area-by-subtraction, the "draw it!" habit for geometry; systematic listing, organised counting, pigeonhole principle for combinatorics.

Importantly: if a student has a curriculum gap that's blocking geometry (e.g. they haven't been taught angle facts yet in school), Abel flags it to Professor Pi rather than teaching it from scratch. Abel is a competition tutor, not a curriculum tutor.

Week 4 — Speed and Tactics

Time pressure enters the room. Not full-paper conditions yet — block timing. "Do these five Q1-10 style questions in seven minutes." The skip decision becomes part of the practice: read the question, ten seconds to decide attempt or skip, then go.

This week is also where Abel teaches the 2-minute rule: if you've been on a question for two minutes with no progress, move on. Coming back later with a fresh head is dramatically more productive than five minutes of staring.

Week 5 — Mock Papers

A full JMC past paper under competition conditions. 60 minutes, no calculator, MCQ, the lot. Followed by a detailed debrief that's much more important than the score itself.

The debrief audits four things:

1. Score by block — Q1-15 vs Q16-25, with penalties applied
2. Time allocation — was time spent in proportion to question difficulty
3. Skip decisions — which questions should have been skipped and weren't
4. Strategy use — which competition strategies were applied and which were missed

Abel logs all of this and the next session targets the weakest area.

Week 6 — Taper

This is the part most prep regimes get wrong. The week before the competition, you stop pushing. New strategies are off the menu. Hard problems are off the menu. The session is 15 minutes of confident review on already-known territory, plus a short conversation about mental prep. Abel's final-session message, verbatim from the system prompt: "You're ready. Remember: secure Q1-15 first. Read every question carefully. If stuck for more than three minutes, move on. Trust your estimation. Have fun — this is a puzzle game, not a test." The taper is the difference between a confident student walking in and an over-revised one.

Past papers — the canonical sources

There's no substitute for real past UKMT papers. Three places to find them:

• UKMT directly (ukmt.org.uk/competition-papers) — free archive, calibrated authentic
• Dr Frost Maths (drfrostmaths.com) — sorts UKMT problems by topic, brilliant for Week 3 deep dives
• NRICH (nrich.maths.org) — competition-style problems with full explanations, great for "I got it wrong, why?" follow-up

Abel can generate original JMC-style problems at the right difficulty, and does so when targeted practice is needed. But the bulk of the prep uses real past papers because authentic calibration matters.

What scaling up to IMC looks like

IMC prep is structurally similar but content is denser. Six-week countdown still applies, with three adjustments:

• Curriculum prerequisites are higher — Pythagoras, basic trig, surds, more algebra. A Year 9 doing IMC for the first time often needs Pi to fill some gaps first.
• More geometry, often involving constructions and area arguments. Week 3's category deep dive doubles down here.
• Mock paper Week 5 is more brutal — IMC papers have a steeper difficulty curve, and the debrief takes longer.

A student who got Silver on JMC in Year 8 is realistically aiming for Bronze or Silver on IMC in Year 9. Gold on IMC is exceptional and usually requires a second year of practice plus genuine enthusiasm.

BMO — different beast entirely

BMO Round 1 is six problems, 3.5 hours, full written proofs required. The skills overlap with IMC but extend into proof writing, deeper geometry, olympiad-level number theory, and inequalities. Abel can prepare for BMO, but only for students with strong IMC results and genuine appetite. The prep regime is typically eight to twelve weeks and focuses on writing complete mathematical arguments rather than finding answers. A different mode of work entirely.

What Abel doesn't do during prep

• Stack JMC sessions on top of school revision week. The energy protocol gates everything.
• Insist on Gold as a goal. If the student is loving the journey but isn't Gold-track, Abel celebrates the journey.
• Hide the paper structure. From session one, the student knows the scoring rules — they're a tool, not a secret.
• Treat the competition as the whole point. The competition is a deadline that organises the prep. The point is the mathematical taste being built along the way. (See the elegance article.)

A parent's view of how to support this

Three practical things.

1. Don't ask about the score during prep. Ask about the puzzles. "What did you work on today?" is the right question.
2. Acknowledge the framing. This is fun puzzle time, not exam prep. If you treat it like exam prep, the value collapses.
3. Let the taper week be quiet. Resist the urge to add extra revision in the final week. The taper is doing its job.

Related reading

• Meet Professor Abel
• Elegant solutions and mathematical taste
• Meet Professor Pi — the foundations Abel relies on

Jason runs aitutors.me. The six-week structure is adapted from the prep regimes used by UKMT mentors and refined through about 200 logged Abel sessions in the prototype phase. Updated 21 May 2026.