Participation

Can I compete in the IBO?
You can only participate if you meet certain criteria. First of all, you have to win the Biology Olympiad in your country or region (National Biology Olympiad, NBO). Each IBO member country/region can send up to four winners. There are some other restrictions.

• You should not be older than 20 years of age (at 1 July of the year of the competition).
• You can only participate twice.
• You have not yet started university (or equivalent) as a full time/regular student.
• You should be enrolled in a regular secondary school for general education (e.g. not specific for STEM or biology). Note: this excludes home-schooled students and most foreign or international schools. Please contact your local coordinator to learn more.

There are some other criteria. For the full list, please see section §3.5 from our Operational Guidelines.

My country or region does not have a Biology Olympiad, can I still participate?
No, unfortunately not. We do not allow students to participate independently.

Where can I register for participation?
You cannot register for participation with the IBO directly. Please talk with your high school teacher, look at the website of your national/regional competition, or contact your local coordinator. Please see here: IBO member country/region.

I am living abroad, can I still compete?
Only in some rare cases. The most important criterion is that you should be enrolled in a regular school in the country you represent. Your place of residence or nationality does not matter. For example, if you are an Austrian and live in Austria but go to a German school across the border, you would be eligible to participate in the German Biology Olympiad. If you become a winner there, you may represent Germany in the IBO (but not Austria). However, if you go to a German school in the USA, you would not be allowed to represent Germany in the IBO. In this case, you would also not be able to participate in the USA Biology Olympiad and represent the USA in the IBO, because your German school is not a regular school under the USA government.
If you want to know more, please contact your local coordinator.

I won, now what?
Congratulations! Your next challenge is the international competition. Here you will make Theoretical and Practical Exams. The Theoretical Exams encompass ca. 100 tasks in largely closed-ended format (e.g., multiple true-false). These tasks cover all domains of biology and require you to apply your science knowledge in analyzing advanced biological phenomena. The Practicals typically fall into 3-4 laboratories. The content domains for each Practical are announced ca. 6-12 months before an IBO. In the lab, students showcase biological skills by conducting investigations and analyzing data.

A typical IBO week is structured like this:

How can I prepare for the IBO?
There is no fixed syllabus or curriculum for the IBO. You should expect a large variety of topics to be part of the examinations. Always consult your team leaders for advice on how to prepare. Many countries use university level general biology textbooks in their final preparation rounds. Taking a look at old IBO exams can be worthwhile. Our IBO's Operational Guidelines provide some information on the distribution of theoretical topics (§3.7.3) and general practical skills (Appendix 2).

IBO exams do not focus on knowledge reproduction (i.e. factual based questions, easily prepared by rote memorization). Instead we focus on how biology works in real life situations: the vast majority of problems you will face during a modern IBO exam will test your practical skills, your biological insight, your analytical approach and capacity for problem solving.