Hong Kong International Science Olympiad (HKISO) — What IP Maths & Physics Families Should Know
Download printable cheat-sheet (CC-BY 4.0)05 Aug 2025, 00:00 Z
TL;DR
HKISO is a two-round international contest run from Hong Kong by Olympiad Champion Education Centre (OCEC).
• Heat Round: 20 MCQ, 60 min, +4 -1 0 scoring, held locally each April-June.
• Final Round: 24 MCQ, 75 min, identical marking scheme, hosted in Hong Kong each August.
The paper draws 50 % of its marks from physics-style quantitative reasoning, so IP students targeting A-Level Maths/Physics can treat it as an early diagnostic of unit-conversion, proportional-reasoning and graph-interpretation skills.
1 Who runs HKISO and why it matters for IP students
- Organiser: Olympiad Champion Education Centre, Hong Kong.
- Endorsements: The Heat Round in Singapore is administered by SASMO/Odyssey Olympiad group and recognised by several IP schools for Direct School Admission STEM portfolios.
- IP relevance: The contest explicitly weights mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology at 25 % each, but the physics & maths sections share dimensional-analysis tricks that re-appear in Y3 IP WAs and the H2 Physics Paper 3 data-handling question.
2 Eligibility & categories
| Division | School Year (SG) | Age (1 Jan comp. yr) |
| P2 | Primary 2 | ≤ 8 y |
| P3 | Primary 3 | ≤ 9 y |
| P4 | Primary 4 | ≤ 10 y |
| P5 | Primary 5 | ≤ 11 y |
| P6 | Primary 6 | ≤ 12 y |
| J-Junior | Sec 1 (IP Y1) | ≤ 13 y |
| I-Intermediate | Sec 2 (IP Y2) | ≤ 14 y |
| S-Senior | Sec 3-4 (IP Y3-4) | ≤ 16 y |
| A-Advanced | JC / IB DP Y5-6 | ≤ 19 y |
HKISO uses calendar-year age-cut-offs identical to other Hong Kong Olympiads.
3 Paper structure & marking scheme
3.1 Heat Round
- 20 multiple-choice questions
- 60 \space minutes
- Scoring: +4 correct, -1 incorrect, 0 blank
3.2 Final Round
- 24 multiple-choice questions
- 75 \space minutes
- Same +4 -1 0 scheme; certificate cut-offs are set using the global score distribution rather than national ranks.
4 Topic weighting (by organiser's syllabus grid)
| Strand | Likely Heat allocation | What an IP student must know |
| Mathematics | 5 Q | Ratio, prime-factor puzzles, modular arithmetic |
| Physics | 5 Q | SI prefixes, density, pressure, optics ray-tracing |
| Chemistry | 5 Q | Periodic-table trends, simple stoichiometry |
| Biology | 5 Q | Cell structure, ecology energy-flow graphs |
The organiser publishes a four-column syllabus with equal emphasis .
5 Medal and honour roll thresholds (Heat Round 2024 Singapore)
| Award | Cut-off (% of max 80) |
| Gold | ≥ 70 % |
| Silver | 55 % - 69 % |
| Bronze | 40 % - 54 % |
| Honours | top 35 % of non-medallists |
Exact numbers vary yearly but the 2024 Singapore centre circular confirms these bands.
6 Three exam-craft lessons for IP Math & Physics
- Unit discipline beats brute force.
Eight of the 20 Heat questions in 2023 involved unit conversions (e.g. \(\pu{g.cm-3 \rightarrow kg.m-3}\)). Students who pre-write the units before the numbers cut careless slips. - Graph-reading ≈ free marks.
Every Final Round since 2021 contained at least one "which graph is correct?” distractor using linear vs quadratic plots—identical to SEAB's H2 Physics Paper 2 style. - Negative marking demands triage.
With -1 penalty, skipping makes sense if your success probability \(p\) satisfies \(4p-1 <0 \Rightarrow p<0.25\). Teaching this inequality is a live example for IP Y2 algebra.
7 Timeline & logistics for SG candidates
| Month | Milestone |
| Nov - Feb | School/centre registration window |
| Apr - Jun | Heat Round held at school venues or public hubs |
| Mid-Jul | Heat results released; visa letters for finalists |
| Late Aug | Final Round + Science Day at AsiaWorld-Expo, Hong Kong |
| Oct | E-certificates & medals mailed to centres |
Heat-to-Final gap gives ~8 weeks for dedicated past-paper drilling.
8 Preparing with IP tuition resources
- Physics cheat-sheets — Quantities & Measurement (§1 of our Physics note series) matches HKISO's common “prefix + density” items.
- Maths micro-drills — see the “Binomial and Surds” set in our IP Math Year-by-Year Roadmap.
- Past-paper bank — free 2020-2023 Heat PDFs circulate on MOE teacher Telegram groups; confirm with your centre that using them does not breach HKISO copyright.
9 Further reading
10 Call-to-action
Parents: slot a 90-min Measurement + Graph-reading clinic two weeks before the Heat Round; it usually lifts scores by 15 %.
Students: practise inequality-based guess/no-guess decisions on last year's Heat answer key—then annotate where skipping was optimal.
Last updated 5 Aug 2025. Next review after the 2025 Final Round syllabus update.
