Parents who ask me this usually have a child who is good at maths, sometimes very good, and a doubt. The olympiads, the Coupe Animath, the Kangourou: are they a real plus for the child's path, or one more activity in an already full week? Should they push, or let the child come to it?
My answer comes in two parts. No school or university requires olympiads. And yet, for some students, preparing for them is one of the best investments of their schooling, for a reason that has almost nothing to do with the prize.
Are maths competitions important for my child's education?
Start with what can be checked. Parcoursup, the French national platform for applying to higher education, has no box for awards: a competition is mentioned in an optional activities section. MIT states that it does not expect or require applicants to take part in any specific STEM programme. Cambridge and Oxford ask for no olympiad. A student can get into the best French prépa (the two-year intensive programmes leading to the top engineering schools) or a leading university abroad without ever having sat one.
What decides, in these routes, is maths grades, then selection tests: the TMUA and interviews at Cambridge and Oxford, the Concours général for France's top lycée students, the entrance exams to engineering schools after prépa. These tests have one thing in common. They set problems the student has never seen, and they look at how the student searches and how they write. According to the Cambridge maths faculty's admissions guide, the interview is there to see how the candidate thinks about a mathematical problem.
That is where olympiads become important: not as a line on the application, but as training for what every selective step afterwards measures.
Doing maths competitions: what the child learns
A student who prepares seriously for olympiads learns what even an excellent maths class teaches poorly.
They learn to search. In class, the exercise follows the lesson: you know in advance which method to use. In an olympiad, the problem does not say where to start. The student tries small cases, draws a figure, guesses a pattern, gets it wrong, starts again. It is a skill in its own right, and it can be trained.
They learn to persist. Staying forty minutes on a problem without letting go, accepting not to find the answer straight away. Very quick students often struggle most with this, because everything has always worked for them first time.
They learn to write. A correct idea badly written earns little in olympiads, as in the Concours général, as in prépa. Writing a complete proof, where every step is justified, is the skill that separates a good student from one who will thrive in demanding programmes.
Olympiads and the Coupe Animath: for which students they matter
For a child aiming for a scientific prépa, EPFL, ETH Zurich, an engineering school, or maths and computer science at Cambridge, Oxford or a leading American university, I consider olympiad preparation close to essential. It prepares them directly for what lies ahead. And if they win a prize, it adds to the application; I explain what it weighs there in Maths olympiads on a university application. Parents of these students often ask me whether they should also learn to code: I answer that in Should my child learn to code.
For a child who enjoys maths without a precise scientific plan, it is useful without being decisive: rigour and persistence help everywhere, in economics as in law. For a child who is struggling in maths, on the other hand, it is not the right tool. The coursework comes first; olympiads may come later.
When to start, and the trap to avoid
The right moment is around age 13, with the Olympiades de quatrième and the Coupe Animath in middle school, or earlier with the Kangourou for fun. Starting early leaves time to climb step by step, from accessible puzzles to real proofs. I describe which competition to choose at which age in Kangourou, Alkindi, olympiads, Animath.
The trap is twofold. Entering a student in the Olympiades de première (for ages 16 to 17) in March "for the application", with no preparation: they meet an unfamiliar type of problem and come out discouraged. Or, the other way round, pushing them too early onto papers that are too hard: a child who fails every week ends up believing they are not cut out for maths, when it may have been their strength. The difficulty has to rise with them.
What olympiads do not replace
Olympiads replace neither grades nor the syllabus. A student who shines in competitions but neglects their tests closes the very doors they wanted to open: selective programmes read school reports first. The right balance is an hour or two of problems a week, alongside regular coursework, without one eating into the other.
That balance is what I build with my students in private lessons: choosing competitions at the right age, adjusting the difficulty, reading their write-ups, and keeping grades up. To practise between sessions, Fields, our free tool, gathers nearly 200 past-paper problems sorted by difficulty, along with our other resources. And when application time comes, Carmine ties these years of work to the file. For the method itself, see Preparing for the French maths olympiads.