SASMO Preparation Course: Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiad

Grade-specific papers, which changes preparation

The Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiad sets a separate paper for each grade rather than broad age bands. That has a practical consequence: preparation must be pitched to the paper the student will actually sit, because practice at the wrong level is either discouraging or too easy to be worth the time.

We confirm the correct paper against the current official specification before beginning. This sounds administrative and is not: a student prepared a year above their paper spends months on material that will not appear, and a student prepared a year below walks into questions they have never seen.

Two sections that reward different habits

The paper is divided, with an earlier multiple-choice section and a harder part where the answer must be supplied rather than selected.

These reward genuinely different behaviour. In the multiple-choice section, the options are information: elimination and estimation are legitimate and often faster than solving forwards. In the free-response section, that safety net is gone, and an arithmetic slip that would have been caught by finding no matching option now simply costs the mark.

The back-end problems are where strong students separate themselves, and they are also where students most often give up without attempting. We work on both the mathematics and the willingness to start.

Logical thinking as a taught subject

SASMO weights logical deduction heavily, and school mathematics barely touches it. Problems give a set of constraints and ask what must follow, and students who approach these by guessing and checking succeed on the easy ones and stall on the rest.

We teach systematic elimination explicitly: recording what each constraint rules out, in writing, and narrowing until one possibility survives. Students find this unfamiliar for about two weeks and then considerably easier than guessing.

The other three areas

Number theory covers divisibility, factors and multiples, remainders, and the digit-pattern problems that appear every year. Geometry works angles, triangles and areas at the level of the student paper, with emphasis on drawing the figure accurately.

Combinatorics introduces systematic counting and arrangements, and brings in the pigeonhole principle through problems rather than as a stated theorem, which is how it actually becomes usable.

What preparation changes

SASMO problems are non-routine, meaning they do not announce their method. The instinct is to prepare by learning more content, and that helps less than expected, because the content needed is rarely beyond the school year.

What changes outcomes is the habit of trying several approaches before settling, and of asking what a problem is really about before computing. A student who starts calculating immediately often produces careful work that answers a different question than the one asked.

How the classes run

Sessions are live and online, one-on-one or in small groups of two to six. Students work problems during the session while the teacher watches the attempt, since with non-routine problems the instructive moment is in the approach rather than the final line.

The closing weeks use past papers at the student grade level under timed conditions, reviewed for where time went as well as where marks went.

Who this suits

Students with solid arithmetic for their year, from those meeting competition mathematics for the first time to those already sitting several olympiads. No prior contest experience is assumed.

Grade bands, paper structure and dates are set by the organisers and change between cycles; check the official SASMO site for the current year.

Attempting the hard questions

The most common avoidable loss on a SASMO paper is not a wrong answer but a blank one. Students reach the harder free-response problems, judge them beyond reach, and leave them untouched.

Often they are not beyond reach. The back-end problems usually need one idea rather than advanced content, and a student who has practised starting, by writing down what is given, trying a small case and drawing the figure, finds that a reasonable fraction of them open up. We spend the final weeks deliberately on problems the student initially judges impossible, because changing that judgement is worth more marks than any additional topic.