People often ask how an Olympiad is put together. I am responsible for setting the Cayley, Hamilton and Maclaurin Olympiads. There is a committee which edits the paper, but proposals can be submitted by anyone with an interest in setting questions. I sometimes have different ways of thinking about topics on the syllabus when teaching during the year and note them down to try to come up with interesting questions. But people see things in different ways, so we are always open to proposals.

I collect the proposals together and the committee discusses their suitability for a paper and where. The paper is then constructed to have a balance of topics and levels of difficulty. We want the paper to be challenging but accessible, so that the students have a good chance of success in completing a problem or two, but also see that there are problems which are much harder than the ones at school. We also want the questions to raise curiosity to enthuse those students to want to study more maths.

After the paper is sat, the scripts need to be assessed. There is a marking weekend, recently taking place in London (see photo), where about fifty volunteers come together to do this. Marking is done in a computer lab, where we can grade the scripts through an online system. We work in teams on a problem to ensure we are rewarding good maths and penalising important gaps in reasoning so the students get a fair score and learn from the experience. There are also volunteers supporting the marking weekend remotely.

Marking might not sound like a fun way to spend a weekend, but there is a large social aspect to the event itself. Conversations continue over dinner into the evening. The volunteers are enthusiastic mathematicians as well, so there is a lot of discussion on interesting maths during the weekend. Many are teachers and they often discuss what’s going on in their teaching or share ideas they have used in their lessons. Teachers also get to see how students go about answering these problems, which can help develop their understanding about how to teach problem-solving. It’s the best CPD training event I’ve done and I’ve learnt more from people there than in any other course.

If you’re interested in volunteering at a marking weekend, if you have proposals you want to submit or want to be involved in the setting of the paper, please get in touch by emailing volunteering@ukmt.org.uk. We’d love to have more people involved.