A total of 245 schools from across the nation participated in the Second Annual USA Biology Olympiad. Of the 38 states, which participated, California had the largest number with 86 semifinalists followed by 58 Semifinalists from Virginia and 54 from New Jersey. Maryland qualified 32 students for the Semifinal exam. more...

Look! what AB of IBO has decided upon our proposal:

A. Number of questions
Iran advocated in a written proposal that 50 good quality and good discriminating  questions are appropriate for the IBO (25% should be A type (multiple choice) and 75% B type).
This triggers a discussion, what number of questions is the optimum. The IBO covers a broad range of fields and topics and this requires many questions in order to offer a balanced task. As the IBO is a competition, there is a need to have a good discriminating power of the tasks and this also requires that the number of questions should not be  too small. Assessment experts will be consulted about the relationship between number of questions, type of questions, number of students and discriminating power.
But the majority of the AB meeting supports the idea of trying to reduce the number of questions in the theoretical part of the IBO.

"Gecko Gazette" is a newsletter for the 15th International Biology Olympiad. you can download it from the website of 15th IBO.>>>