Get ready! Rove has a new fifth grade class for 2009 that's all ready to help out even more Australians walks away with a truck load of prize money.

Rove McManus is back with a new class for the third series of Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? throwing caution to the wind and ignoring the old showbiz laws about working with children and/or animals.

In 2009 Rove has interviewed the prime minister, travelled to Hogwarts to talk to the cast of Harry Potter and played host to a cast of Australia’s funniest in one of his most successful series of Rove in the show’s ten year history.

Now he is back in the classroom with a new bunch of kids and more ordinary Australians who are lining up to stare down the barrel of our camera and admit that they wouldn’t have cut the mustard in grade five.

It is one thing to be a lawyer, teacher or farmer flunking out of the fifth grader classroom, but the stakes get higher when you are the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education. The Honourable Julia Gillard will be looking to our fifth grader class for support and clues when she faces our very special version of question time.

The Member for Labor will not be the only well known Australian putting their reputation on the line, Masterchef’s Matt Preston, WWE’s Big Show, James Mathison, Dave Hughes, Olympian Ian Thorpe and Jane Hall will all be casting their minds back to simpler days where Bata Scouts and girl germs were the hot issues of the day.

Rove and his Roving Enterprises team have had a lot of fun on set with “5th Grader” this year sitting back and letting our latest bunch of ten and eleven year olds shine.

Series three of Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? returns on Monday, July 27th at 7.30pm.

Created by Mark Burnett (The Apprentice, Survivor) Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? is a Roving Enterprises production for Network Ten.

How the show works

It’s Everyone’s Nightmare:

Having to take a test that you haven’t studied for (in a really long time) while standing in front of the entire class (that seats the whole country).

On Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, our contestants can turn this nightmare into a dream come true by answering a series of questions that a kid in the fifth grade would know the answers to.  But will they leave with dignity intact?   Will they prove they are in fact smarter than a fifth grader or admit defeat?

It’s the world’s easiest game show, and it finds adults teetering between elation and humiliation, as each one tries to answer the question….Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

This is how it works:

The subjects and grade levels are displayed on a board (e.g. Grade 4 Geography, Grade 5 Maths etc.) the contestant can answer them in whatever order they want. Each correct answer moves them higher up the ladder, from $500 all the way through to $250,000. If they make it that far, they are given the chance to answer one last question for $500,000.

But the stakes are always high; until they hit the $30,000 question, a wrong answer means the contestants go home empty handed.  And after that, if they bomb out, then $30,000 is all they get - even if they're going for half a million.

They do have the option to walk off with their winnings after hearing each question. All our grown ups have to do is turn to the camera and admit, “I am NOT smarter than a 5th Grader!”

Once each question is read, the contestant can walk away, answer …or CHEAT.

Here’s how the CHEATS work.

On the show’s set is a classroom with five actual students, who come up to help our contestant, two questions per student.  The contestant can use their kid partner in three ways:

1. Peek
The contestant can look at their partner’s paper to see if their answer helps.

2. Copy
The contestant lets their partner answer for him, but MUST accept the answer sight unseen.

3. Save
This kicks in automatically. If the contestant answers wrong and their partner has answered right, they are saved and live to fight another day.

The contestant can use each of these CHEATS only once.  Once all the cheats are gone, their classmates can no longer help them.