From Kyrgyzstan to IBO Bronze: Ruslanbekov 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 Ruslanbekov Ulukbek is careful to draw the line between them. Since this page first went up he has written a much fuller, stage-by-stage guide to the pathway, and this page now reflects that newer version. Where it differs from what he first told us, the newer version wins.
The National Olympiad: the route to the IBO
The National Olympiad aims to prepare students for the International Biology Olympiad (IBO). It can help you get into universities abroad, especially if you win an IBO medal. It can still help you earn a scholarship at a university in Kyrgyzstan, but if you are capable of winning an IBO medal, I do not think you should limit yourself to Kyrgyzstan.
There are two divisions, Junior and Senior. The Junior Division also selects students for the National Junior Science Olympiad (NJSO), which in turn selects six students for the International Junior Science Olympiad (IJSO). The IBO team comes from the Senior pathway. Ruslanbekov Ulukbek’s earlier description of how the olympiad is run still stands:
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 four stages
| Stage | When | Format | Who advances |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | January | Online, open to anyone | Approximately the top 50% |
| 2 | February | Online, with proctoring (laptop or tablet plus a phone) | No more than 100 students, exact number varies |
| 3 | March | On-site, first stage with practical exams | No more than 30 Senior and 15 Junior students |
| 4 | April | On-site over two days, theory then practicals | The top four Senior students represent Kyrgyzstan at the IBO |
Stage 1 (January). Held after the winter holidays, around the middle of January. Almost all the questions are memory-based. The length of the exam may vary, but it is normally no longer than two hours.
Stage 2 (February). Your recording will be reviewed, and you may be disqualified if you do not provide the required video or if you cheat. Prepare your setup and follow all instructions as soon as possible. Many students have been unable to participate because they did not read the instructions or could not complete the setup on time. Setting everything up and checking that it works may take from one to two hours. The jury decides how many students advance, so do not assume that ranking exactly 100th guarantees qualification. Most questions are memory-based. The exam length may vary, but it is normally no longer than three hours.
Stage 3 (March). This is the first stage that introduces practical exams. However, this does not mean that you will perform experiments in a laboratory. Instead, you may do calculations and analysis-based tasks on paper and on a laptop. The practical topics correspond to the IBO practical topics announced for that year. The top 15 students in the Junior Division are also invited to participate in the NJSO. During the 2026 selection, we had one 90-minute theory exam and four 30-minute practical exams.
Stage 4 (April). This is where the real game begins. The theory exam uses restricted IBO-style papers, and you will complete real practical exams. You will work in a laboratory and analyse large amounts of data on a computer. The first day is devoted to theory: two IBO papers, each lasting three hours, with a one-hour lunch break between them. The second day consists of practical exams, each lasting 90 minutes, with 15 to 30-minute breaks between exams. All four practical exams follow the IBO curriculum.
The “top four” at Stage 4 reflects Ruslanbekov Ulukbek’s first account (the IBO team size is four); his newer guide does not restate it.
How the topics are weighted
| Theory exam | Weight |
|---|---|
| Cell Biology | 20% |
| Plant Biology | 15% |
| Animal Biology | 25% |
| Genetics and Evolution | 20% |
| Biosystematics | 10% |
| Ecology | 10% |
| Practical exam (Stages 3 and 4 only) | Weight |
|---|---|
| Animal Anatomy and Physiology | 25% |
| Cell and Molecular Biology | 25% |
| Ecology and Systematics | 25% |
| Microbiology | 25% |
Keep in mind that Stage 4 of the National Biology Olympiad uses a T-score system. Your performance in each section is compared with the average performance of all students in that section, and your final score is calculated from those comparisons.
This is similar to the IBO scoring system and helps identify the strongest students. It reduces the effect of differences in difficulty and total raw points between exams. It also rewards students who perform exceptionally well in difficult topics in which most participants struggle.
It is a very effective system. Without it, I would have placed in the top six rather than first overall. Atakhan, who placed third, and I both went on to win IBO medals. So yes, the system works exceptionally well.
Skipping the first two stages
If you win a medal in BBO, you may be allowed to skip Stages 1 and 2 and enter the National Olympiad at Stage 3.
Ruslanbekov Ulukbek lists four olympiads that may allow direct entry at Stage 3: the British Biology Olympiad (BBO), the USA Biology Olympiad (USABO), the University of Toronto National Biology Competition (NBC) and the Belarusian Online Biology Olympiad (BIO). He recommends the first and warns strongly against the last. His reasons, and the rest of his advice on which olympiads are worth the entry fee, are in his preparation roadmap (linked at the bottom of this page).
Where to register and find materials
- National Biology Olympiad website
- NBO Telegram channel, where you register for the National Biology Olympiad
- Olympiad League, where most online olympiads are run, and its Telegram channel
- Ruslanbekov Ulukbek’s shared Google Drive of NBO materials
The official picture
Ruslanbekov 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, the specific cutoffs between rounds, the T-score system or the topic weightings. That operational detail is the kind of ground-level context an actual participant like Ruslanbekov Ulukbek can add. One difference is worth noting: the profile describes Stage 3 as computer-based at regional centers, while Ruslanbekov Ulukbek describes it as on-site with paper and laptop tasks. We have kept his account as the more recent and firsthand one.
Sources: IBO country profile, National Biology Olympiad (NBO), Kyrgyzstan; Ruslanbekov Ulukbek’s own written guide for everything else on this page.
The Republic Olympiad: a different competition
The other olympiad does not feed into the IBO at all, and Ruslanbekov 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.
The Republic Olympiad is a more direct route to earning a full scholarship at a university in Kyrgyzstan, and it will usually help you more with local university admissions than with applications abroad. Its content is very different from that of the National Olympiad, so preparing for the Republic Olympiad will not properly prepare you for the National Olympiad.
For example, a student who placed third in the Republic Olympiad ranked 30th in the National Olympiad. The Republic Olympiad's content is closer to the national school curriculum and to Russian or Soviet-style materials.
Independent reporting on Kyrgyzstan’s republican school olympiad system corroborates the structure Ruslanbekov 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 Ruslanbekov 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.
Go deeper: Ruslanbekov Ulukbek’s preparation roadmap
Everything above is specific to Kyrgyzstan. His advice on how long preparation takes, which books to read, how to study and what to solve in which order applies to any student aiming for an IBO medal, and has its own article: From Zero to IBO Bronze: Ruslanbekov Ulukbek’s Preparation Roadmap.
How BiOGuide fits in
Ruslanbekov 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 Ruslanbekov 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.