Best Way to Prepare for SOF IGKO Exams

IGKO or the International General Knowledge Olympiad is scheduled to be held on 6th and 26th of September this year. The exam is held for all classes 1-10 and has only one level of exam.
General knowledge being a vast subject it often becomes difficult to know what to study. For this we need to know the format of the exam, the sections under which questions are asked, the weightage of each section, the pattern and the syllabus of the exam.

To start with IGKO is not meant to tax your knowledge. The purpose of IGKO is to help you widen your horizon of awareness. It helps to inculcate a habit to absorb information from sources external to your notebooks along with being able to correlate this information with what you learn in your textbooks.

The IGKO exam is divide into 4 sections. Let’s analyse the requirement of each of these sections.

General Awareness – This section holds the maximum importance and thus has the maximum weightage of 50-55%. It is the most scoring section and covers the general topics from your school curriculum, mainly from subjects like Social Studies, Universe and the World, Science, technology and language.For a more details check IGKO Syllabus.

Current Affairs – Another important section of IGKO this has a weightage of approximately 15%. This covers questions on topics like entertainment, sports and current affairs. This can be best covered by external news sources like newspaper, television or any other medium which keeps us updated on the happenings all across the world. The questions are drafted keeping in mind the age of the participant.

Life Skills – Life skills are an important part in character building. This section having a weightage of 10-15% is very scoring as it is entirely based on life skills like effective communication, empathy, quantitative aptitude, reasoning, decision making and personal and inter-personal skills. Though these appear as tough topics these are just life-skills you require in day to day life.

Achievers Section – This section though comprises of just 5 questions has high importance for scoring in IGKO. Their weightage is higher as each question of this section is a 2 marker (for classes 1-4) or 3 marker( for classes 5-10). This section consists of HOTS (High order thinking skills) questions which are questions from the above syllabus only but of a higher difficulty level.

Coming to the source of the content for precise IGKO exam preparation. Authenticity of the resource for IGKO preparation is very important. It helps you to stay focused on the syllabus and guide you to the level of preparation required. In addition to the IMO, NSO, NCO, IEO and IGKO Test Banks and the IGKO Previous years papers, it is suggested to go through the Reasoning question bank for the same. Make your preparation effective and precise with an additional question bank available online in IGKO DOPS (Daily Online Practice sets) on SOF Olympiad Trainer.