Hi,

I plan to participate in the Australian biology olympiad next year, and I was thinking of preparing during this holidays. I am quite eager to prepare, however, when I look at websites such as this one: https://biolympiads.com/what-are-the-best-resources-for-studying-for-the-biology-olympiad-competition/ , it literally says that I have to be reading at least 9 textbooks 😱 😰 😭 !! I don't think I have time to afford that much preparation, so I was wondering if anyone has sat the biology olympiad before, and how much did they prepare / what did they prepare with? I was going to just use the past papers, but since I am only in Y10 right now, I barely know any of the content so I kind of have to use some textbooks/worksheets. So, does anyone have any advice about how much I should be preparing, what I should be preparing with, and how difficult the test really is? I'm kind of stressing out right now.

All help appreciated!

    Hi 1234qwerty! My impression is that the webpage you linked seems a little excessive for the Australian olympiad, maybe you might get closer to that in preparing for the International Biology Olympiad if you make it there. I have done only the physics and chemistry olympiads, but maybe some of my advice might be helpful. Firstly you should check out the syllabus and that can help guide what you want to work on. Getting a moderate grasp of subject knowledge up to and including year 12 (just the standard year-by-year textbooks should be fine) was a good base to start for me and pretty much sufficient to do reasonably well on the olympiads as they relied mainly on problem solving skills rather than preknowledge, but biology might be different. Check out ASI's Olympiad Online platform which is another source of practice questions. You might also want to consider finding any training programmes that might be offered by your school or other organisations. Hope some of that helps! It is great that you are already looking to start preparing and you have plenty of time, there is really no need to stress at all at this point.

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