AMC 8 2027: Dates, Registration, Prep Plan, and Awards

The AMC 8 (American Mathematics Competition 8) is a math contest run every January by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Students answer 25 multiple-choice questions in 40 minutes. Each correct answer is worth one point, wrong answers carry no penalty, and calculators are not allowed.

Any student in grade 8 or below who is under 15.5 years old on test day can take it, and there is no minimum grade. Many 4th through 6th graders who enjoy math take it for that reason. The content is middle school math, though, so it is a real stretch for elementary students. The overall average on the 2026 contest was about 12 out of 25.

For the 2026-27 season, the AMC 8 window runs from Thursday, January 21 through Wednesday, January 27, 2027. The school or organization hosting the contest picks the actual day and time within that week. Two schools in the same area can test on different days.

The registration deadlines below apply to the school or organization's Competition Manager, who registers with the MAA. They are not deadlines for students. The fees are also what the host pays, and each site sets its own per-student cost. Dates can change, so check the MAA's official page for the latest.

Parents and students cannot register for the AMC 8 with the MAA directly. Students take it through a school or organization that has a Competition Manager. The first step is to find out whether your child's school is offering the AMC 8 this year. In FCPS, the schools that offer it are mostly middle schools, and elementary schools vary. Ask the math teacher or the AART whether the school participates and how students sign up.

If the school doesn't offer it, look for a public testing site that accepts outside students. Universities, math circles, and learning centers host the contest, and during the registration season the MAA's registration page (maa.org/amcreg) lets you search for sites by ZIP code. Public sites have few seats, and some close sign-ups in mid-December, well before the MAA deadlines. Right now, confirming a seat matters more than studying.

Individual AMC 8 awards depend on where a student's score falls among all participants. The top 5% make the Honor Roll, the top 1% make the Distinguished Honor Roll, and a perfect 25 earns a Certificate of Distinction. The Distinguished Honor Roll sometimes appears on certificates as the Honor Roll of Distinction.

The award elementary parents should know is the Achievement Roll. It goes to any student in grade 6 or below who scores 15 or higher, and that threshold does not change from year to year. There is also a School Winner pin for the top scorer at each site, and gold, silver, and bronze certificates for the top three. Whether these are actually handed out depends on the site.

The Honor Roll and Distinguished Honor Roll are set by percentile, so the cutoffs move with the difficulty of each year's contest. Over the last four years the Honor Roll cutoff rose from 17 to 21, and the Distinguished Honor Roll cutoff rose from 21 to 24. The 2027 cutoffs will be announced after the contest, usually in February.

That makes it hard to say in advance what score will earn an award. A realistic approach is to make 15, the fixed Achievement Roll threshold, the first goal, and then use recent cutoffs as a guide when aiming for the low 20s.

Start with what it doesn't do. An AMC 8 score does not qualify a student for a next-round contest. Only AMC 10 and AMC 12 scores lead to the AIME. FCPS's AAP screening and TJ admissions don't ask for AMC 8 scores either.

The real benefits are elsewhere. Students receive a certificate from the MAA and an objective read on where they stand among peers nationwide. The result is also something to list when a math camp or enrichment program asks about contest experience. Above all, what a student learns while preparing carries straight into MATHCOUNTS and the AMC 10 in middle school. The AMC 10 has no minimum grade, so students who do well on the AMC 8 sometimes start taking it in middle school.

The AMC 8 draws evenly from arithmetic, ratios and percents, beginning algebra, geometry, counting and probability, and number theory. Questions get harder as the test goes on. In general, the first 15 can be solved by a student who knows the concepts, and the last 10 require combining several ideas. For an elementary student taking it for the first time, a good goal is to get the first 15 right without careless errors. That score is the Achievement Roll threshold.

As of early October, when this post was written, 15 weeks remain before the first day of the window. Past exams are the best study material. Begin untimed, filling in concepts your child hasn't seen yet, and from mid-November switch to full 40-minute timed runs. For each missed problem, have your child re-solve it the next day without the solution instead of only checking the answer. Students who have built their foundations with Singapore Math or Beast Academy will find that ratios, area, and counting connect naturally to past AMC 8 problems.

Because wrong answers carry no penalty, a blank answer only costs points. Even on a problem your child can't solve, have them rule out at least one choice and then pick an answer. Twenty-five questions in 40 minutes works out to an average of 1 minute 36 seconds each. Spending more than three minutes on one problem means missing solvable ones later in the test.

We recommend working through the test in two passes. On the first pass, solve only the problems that come quickly, and mark the rest and move on. After reaching the end, return to the marked problems with the time that's left. Since the test is multiple-choice, plugging the choices into the problem or estimating to narrow them down also works.

Most of what a student needs to prepare for the AMC 8 is available free. Past exams and solutions are organized by year on the AoPS Wiki and on Professor Po-Shen Loh's LIVE site. The LIVE site hosts past exam PDFs along with video solutions, with the MAA's permission.

For practice by topic, AoPS's Alcumus is a good choice. It is a free problem bank that adjusts difficulty to how the student is doing. Paid courses and books can wait until your child has worked through a few past exams and the weak areas are clear.