The organisers of the Physics Olympiad hosted a Year 7 and 8 challenge for the first year. 55 schools and 3581 students entered. RGS students made up the fifth largest entry at 201 candidates completing in both sections.
Nationally, the mean score was 56% with a deviation of 16%. Our mean score was over 70% (with an average deviation of 11%) – the threshold for a Gold was 68%. From the complete entries we got 131 gold and 70 silver – every student who took part should be very proud of their performance!
The organisers said: “We wanted to avoid this being an exam or a test. It is about participation and encouraging students to see physics as perfectly reasonable and quite interesting. Not a collection of formulae, but about ideas and seeing things in the world and beginning to look at them with a physics eye.”