From Kyrgyzstan to IBO Bronze: Ulukbek's Story
In his own words
Hello!!
I am an IBO 2026 bronze medalist from Kyrgyzstan, and if I had had this website when I was in 7th grade, I would probably have participated in the IBO in 9th grade already instead of 10th.
My favourite part about BioGuide is that it offers a reliable pathway that can help students succeed in biology olympiads. It also lays a great foundation, which saves a lot of time. For me, that was a huge problem because I wasted a lot of time revisiting content that I hadn't learned properly.
The olympiad community in Kyrgyzstan is very small, so finding someone to guide you is very difficult. BioGuide solves this problem by showing what accomplished students have done and putting you on the right track.
This site helps a lot of people, and I hope that in the future it will have guides for 20+ national biology olympiads!
Wishing you the best of luck, and while you are on your journey, don't stop loving biology!
Two very different olympiads
Kyrgyzstan runs two separate biology competitions, and Ulukbek was careful to draw the line between them. First, the pathway that actually feeds the IBO team:
Regarding olympiads in Kyrgyzstan, we have the National Olympiad and the Republic Olympiad. To distinguish between them, let me first explain the characteristics of the National Olympiad.
The National Olympiad is conducted by volunteers, so naturally no one gets paid. The experimental equipment, as well as the laboratory, is provided by a private university. The government pays only for the flight tickets and the participation fee. Despite that, the experimental round is levels above that of the Republic Olympiad.
The National Olympiad consists of four rounds. Anyone can enter the first round. To advance to the second round, you need to be in the top 50% of participants from the first round. The third round requires you to place in the top 100, and the fourth round requires you to be in the top 20-30, with the exact number differing each year.
Only the final round includes "wet-lab" experimental tasks. The third round, on the other hand, only has "dry" practical tasks. In the final round, the top four students are chosen to represent Kyrgyzstan at the IBO.
The official picture
Ulukbek’s account matches the broad strokes of how the IBO country profile describes Kyrgyzstan’s National Biology Olympiad (NBO), run by the Ministry of Education in cooperation with the Olympiad League Academy:
| Round | Timing | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | January | 60 multiple-choice theoretical questions, remote/online |
| 2nd | February | Mixed-format theoretical questions (multiple choice, fill-in, matching, true/false), remote/online |
| 3rd | March | Theoretical and practical questions, computer-based, at regional centers |
| 4th | April | Theoretical and practical questions, in Bishkek |
The official profile stops there; it does not mention who funds or staffs the olympiad, or the specific cutoffs between rounds. That operational detail, that it is volunteer-run with lab space donated by a private university, and that advancement narrows from the top 50%, to the top 100, to a final field of 20-30, is exactly the kind of ground-level context an actual participant like Ulukbek can add on top of the official description.
Sources: IBO country profile, National Biology Olympiad (NBO), Kyrgyzstan.
Then there is the other olympiad, one that does not feed into the IBO at all, and Ulukbek had considerably more to say about it:
The Republic Olympiad still persists from the relatively recent post-Soviet period for some reason, despite being inferior to the National Olympiad in many ways.
Let's start from the beginning. It has a school round, district round, regional round, and republic round. Each school chooses its three best students through an examination of its choice. Then, students from schools across the district compete for the top two places in order to advance to the regional round. After that, winners from different districts compete in the regional round for another two spots. Kyrgyzstan has seven regions, and the top two students from each region are chosen for the final round.
In the final round, there is a theoretical and a practical exam. One of them always has a higher weight than the other, and sometimes the difference can be drastic. The weighting appears to be completely random.
There are only three winners in the final round. It is important to note that there are two divisions: advanced and basic. There are no differences in the questions; the only difference is in the ranking and competition. "Smarter schools" do not compete with "regular ones" (I have no idea how exactly they are classified). So, in practice, this doubles the number of participants and winners.
So, what is wrong with this olympiad?
It does not seem to have any effective anti-cheating measures at the district round, meaning that if you spot someone cheating, there is often no reliable mechanism to protect the fairness of the competition. This results in frequent cheating across the country.
The questions also do not align with the IBO in any meaningful way and are more similar to Soviet-style questions that rely heavily on memorization.
The practical exams are poor and are never announced in advance. When I took the theoretical and practical rounds, we were given blades taped to pens, and the practical tasks were only related to plants and zoology. Each section lasted only 30 minutes, so the tasks were very primitive and, most importantly for the organizers, cheap.
By far the worst part of this olympiad is that the questions often contain mistakes. Even if you try to appeal, you are very unlikely to receive any additional points. In practice, successful appeals are almost impossible.
And this happens in every single round.
Independent reporting on Kyrgyzstan’s republican school olympiad system corroborates the structure Ulukbek describes, a school round feeding into district and regional stages before a final republic-wide round, run across the country’s seven regions with prizes and university-admission perks attached for top finishers. Its critiques (the anti-cheating gaps, the error-prone questions, the un-appealable results) are Ulukbek’s own firsthand account rather than something an official press release would state, and we have preserved them as he wrote them.
Sources: Regional stage of the republican school olympiad, open.kg, University-admission benefits for regional olympiad winners, open.kg.
How BiOGuide fits in
Ulukbek’s praise maps onto specific things BiOGuide is built to do:
- The “reliable pathway” and “great foundation” he describes is Notes @ BiOGuide: topic pages chained together with prerequisite and “next topic” links, so a student moving through Kyrgyzstan’s small, guide-scarce olympiad community has a structured route to follow instead of guessing what to read next.
- Not wanting to “revisit content that I hadn’t learned properly” is exactly what the Study Dashboard is for: it tracks mastery per subject after a timed attempt, so a topic only gets marked as done once it is actually demonstrated, not just once it has been read.
- “Showing what accomplished students have done” is BiOrchive and the Question Bank beneath it: real past IBO papers paired with model solutions, so a student without local mentors can still see how a strong answer is actually built.
This article preserves Ulukbek’s own words, shared and published with his consent. If you competed in a Biology Olympiad and want to share your story, reach out to us; we would love to hear from you.