The exam will cover content from high school level physics, with a focus on the topics covered from NCEA levels 1-3. Both juniors (Y9-11) and seniors (Y12-13) will sit the same paper, but will be awarded separately. The difficulty of the questions is similar to that of the British Physics Olympiad.  

The paper is split into a multichoice section (30 marks) and a long answer section (80 marks). Students are encouraged to spend around 30 minutes on the multichoice section and 1.5 hours on the long answer section. Here is the question distribution by topic for the 2025 paper.  

Multichoice section (30 marks)

7 Mechanics

4 Electromagnetism

3 Waves

2 Modern physics

2 Themodynamics

2 Miscellaneous 

Long answer section (80 marks)

One 20-mark question on mechanics, waves, electromagnetism and modern physics respectively. 

For additional preparation, check out Kevin Zhou's Handouts.

Math pre-requisites 

Some questions in the paper may assume some basic calculus knowledge. Participants are expected to know how to:

• Find derivatives and integrals of basic elementary functions

• How to solve simple differential equations: only separable differential equations will be in the paper

• How to write physics formulae in terms of variables and their derivatives

Anything beyond the above will be clarified in the question itself within a information box.