The free olympiad preparation stack: nine resources that cost nothing
By The Sophoz Curriculum Team
The short answer. A child can prepare properly for a SOF olympiad for ₹0 beyond the ₹170 exam fee. The stack is: SOF's own free sample papers for pattern, CREST's two free practice tests for a timed run, Olympiad Success's free weekly mock for repetition, Edugain's free tier for unlimited generated practice, and Khan Academy for any underlying gap. What none of them supply is the thing that actually matters, which is a schedule and mixed practice, and that is free too.
This page exists because no one else has written it. Every guide to olympiad preparation is published by someone selling preparation, and a page listing what you can get without paying monetises nothing.
The nine
1. SOF's own sample papers, free
What: SOF publishes free sample papers after login, for every exam and class.
Why it is first: pattern matters more than difficulty at the start. A child who has never seen the four-section structure with the Achievers Section at the end is losing marks to format, not to mathematics. One sample paper fixes that permanently.
How to use it: once, early, untimed, with the parent sitting alongside. The purpose is recognition, not score.
2. CREST's two free practice tests, included with registration
What: every CREST registration includes two free practice tests. CREST also publishes free sample papers, previous-year papers, downloadable worksheets and revision videos without registration.
Why it matters: CREST is fully online with slot booking, so the practice test also teaches the interface, which removes a real source of lost marks for younger children.
Note the conflict: CREST both sets the exam and supplies the practice, which makes the practice unusually well-aligned and also means it is marketing.
3. Olympiad Success's free weekly mock
What: a free mock test that refreshes weekly, plus free trial quizzes across all subjects and classes.
Why it earns a place: repetition without payment. A fresh timed paper every week for eight weeks is a preparation schedule, and it costs nothing.
4. Edugain's free tier
What: auto-generated unlimited practice, worksheets, tests and quizzes for classes 1 to 10, with a genuinely usable free tier.
Why it matters more than it looks: the generator produces fresh questions rather than a fixed bank, which is exactly what you need for spaced revisiting. A fixed bank gets memorised.
Weakness: mathematics-dominant, dated interface, no teaching layer.
5. Khan Academy, entirely free, with one caveat
What: free NCERT-aligned tracks for Indian classes, plus Maharashtra board and international tracks.
The caveat nobody states: Khan Academy has no olympiad-specific content. It is the best free resource in existence for the underlying syllabus and it will not prepare a child for an olympiad paper's structure.
So use it for exactly one thing: when a child keeps failing on olympiad problems that use a particular idea, the gap is usually in the idea and not in the olympiad. Khan Academy fixes the idea. Then go back to olympiad problems.
6. Previous-year papers, from several sources free
What: SOF publishes past papers; CREST publishes past papers free; Unified Council includes past papers with NSTSE individual registration.
Why they beat practice questions: they are the real difficulty calibration. A question bank written to sell preparation has no incentive to match the actual paper's difficulty, and often overshoots so the paid product feels necessary.
7. SOF's published Level 2 cutoffs
What: SOF publishes class-wise cutoff marks after each cycle. For SOF IMO 2025-26 the top-5 % cutoffs ran roughly 30 to 46 marks across classes 3 to 10.
Why it is a free resource and not just trivia: it converts a vague goal into a number. Against a sixty-mark paper, a class 6 child now knows what the qualifying region looks like, which makes practice targets concrete rather than aspirational.
8. The school library and the second-hand workbook
What: MTG's seven-book class combos sell new at around ₹562. Last year's edition, from a parent whose child has moved up a class, costs nothing.
Why the syllabus barely moves: SOF's pattern has been stable, and a previous year's workbook for the same class is the same workbook. The one thing to check is whether the edition still refers to NSO or NCO, in which case the content is fine and only the exam names have changed.
9. A calendar
What: free.
Why it is on this list, and why it is arguably the most valuable item: the strongest evidence in the study-methods literature is not about resources. It is about scheduling. Spaced practice and mixed practice produced large effects in classroom trials, and both are free. A ₹26,250 course delivered as blocked topic-by-topic drilling is worse than a free question generator used on a mixed, spaced schedule.
The free eight-week plan
This is the whole thing, assuming an exam eight weeks out and a child already comfortable with their year's syllabus.
| Week | What happens | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | One SOF sample paper, untimed, to learn the format. Identify which sections are weak | ₹0 |
| 2-3 | Edugain generated practice on the weak areas, 20 minutes, four days a week. Khan Academy for any underlying gap | ₹0 |
| 3 | First CREST free practice test, timed | ₹0 |
| 4-6 | Mixed practice only. Stop doing one topic at a time. Twelve mixed questions beats thirty blocked ones | ₹0 |
| 4-7 | One free Olympiad Success weekly mock every week, timed, marked | ₹0 |
| 5-7 | Achievers Section focus, one session a week. Five questions, 25 % of marks | ₹0 |
| 6 | Revisit week 2 material. It will have faded, which is the point | ₹0 |
| 8 | One previous-year paper, timed, full conditions. Then stop | ₹0 |
Total: ₹0 plus the ₹170 exam fee.
Two things in that table do the heavy lifting, and both are free. Weeks 4 to 6 being mixed rather than blocked: in a randomised trial with 787 seventh-graders, interleaved practice produced 61 % on a delayed test against 38 % for blocked practice. And week 6 revisiting week 2: spacing improved final performance in 259 of 271 comparisons across 317 experiments. The reasoning behind both is in what the research says about olympiad preparation.
What paying actually buys
Being straight about this, since Sophoz sells olympiad practice and this page is an argument for not needing it.
Paying buys three things, and only three:
Diagnosis. A free question generator does not notice that a child's fraction errors all trace back to not seeing multiplication as scaling. A parent watching closely can notice it. Most parents do not have time to watch that closely across six subjects, and that is what adaptive practice is for.
The scheduling being done for you. Everything in the eight-week plan above is free and requires someone to run it. If that person does not exist in the household, a platform that schedules backwards from the exam date is buying you the schedule, not the content.
Hints at the moment of difficulty. A worksheet cannot answer a question at 8pm.
That is the honest list. It does not include better questions, because the free past papers are the real questions, and it does not include better outcomes, because nobody has demonstrated that.
If those three things are worth money to your household, buy something. If you have the time to run the plan above, the plan above is the same plan.
Frequently asked questions
Can I prepare my child for an olympiad exam for free? Yes. SOF publishes free sample papers, CREST includes two free practice tests with registration and publishes free past papers and worksheets, Olympiad Success runs a free mock each week, and Edugain has a substantial free tier. The only unavoidable cost is the exam fee, which is ₹170 for SOF.
Does Khan Academy have olympiad preparation? No. Khan Academy has no olympiad-specific content. It has free, high-quality NCERT-aligned material for the underlying syllabus, which makes it the right tool for fixing a gap and the wrong tool for learning the exam's format.
Where can I get free olympiad previous-year papers? SOF publishes past papers, CREST publishes them free on its site, and Unified Council includes past papers with NSTSE individual registration. Past papers are better calibrated than most paid question banks, which have an incentive to overshoot the real difficulty.
Is a free olympiad preparation plan as good as a paid course? The content is largely the same and in the case of past papers it is better. What paid platforms add is diagnosis of why a child keeps making the same error, scheduling done for you, and hints available at the moment of difficulty. If nobody in the household has time to run the schedule, that is what you are buying.
How many hours a week does free preparation take? Around twenty minutes four times a week, plus one timed paper at the weekend, works for an eight-week run. Evidence on total practice hours is weak: in education, accumulated deliberate practice explains roughly 4 to 5 % of performance variance. How the practice is structured matters more than how much of it there is.
Verified 21 September 2026. Free tiers change without notice; each platform's own page is the authority.