After reading the problems again, well, I might have to take my words back. When I said basic biology, it's not high-school biology, but college-level biology. There are five main topics: molecular cell biology, anatomy and physiology of animals, anatomy and physiology of plants, genetics, and ecology. If you want to get a medal in the international competition, then, you probably need to read the text book material for each topic to get the basic concepts.
For example, for molecular cell biology, you need to know about electrophoresis. My point was, in the exam, you won't be asked about what is electrophoresis. They will give you an example of an experiment/published paper, give you the background of that experiment, give you the experiment results (including electrophoresis results), and then ask you about the conclusion of the experiment.
I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password[0], but here's one sample question from my archive: https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg
Feel free to reach out to me via email if you want to discuss more.
> I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password
As someone who administered the National Biology Competition in Canada and supported profs in administering the largest first-year biology course in Canada, I can say that there is a LOT of politics behind protecting past tests.
It's just so much labour to have professionals write new tests every year, when writing tests is not what they want to be doing. It comes from the urge to reclaim their time, and build a library instead of going thought the same heavy slog every year
Oh wow. I also used to be in the committee for the National Biology Competition in my country. And yes, it's very hard to make a high quality question, so sometimes we reuse or reskin old problems. A student who has access to past exams archive have significant advantage.
I don't understand why they lock it for international though. AFAIK each year they require every country to provide a couple of questions, and then they will compile it for the exam. Not sure whether they are still doing this.
The thing that would happen then is private cram schools will make their students recover the past test questions from memory, and build up a huge database of questions that only their students have access to. This is how things went in South Korea, and probably explains a part of why they always win so many gold medals.
I did math and physics competitively and all the exams are very easy to access online, which meant that questions were generally "new" each time. It's interesting to see this not be the case…I honestly can't understand how this would reasonably work, because the people who were good literally kept copies of all the problems that they did, so a cottage industry of past tests would inevitably exist anyways.
For example, for molecular cell biology, you need to know about electrophoresis. My point was, in the exam, you won't be asked about what is electrophoresis. They will give you an example of an experiment/published paper, give you the background of that experiment, give you the experiment results (including electrophoresis results), and then ask you about the conclusion of the experiment.
I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password[0], but here's one sample question from my archive: https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg
Feel free to reach out to me via email if you want to discuss more.
[0] https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html