BioBlitz

Introduction

First of all, you're probably wondering what BioBlitz is. It is a platform that hosts public biology tests, called "blitzes", to make biology education more accessible. Studying for the USA Biology Olympiad (USABO) or the MCAT exam takes a tremendous amount of effort and practice is needed to well.

Most people spend hours reading Campbell's Biology to prepare for the opens, but are limited by the few open and semifinal exams that are available. Created by USABO participants, the platform provides a centralized place to take practice tests, as well as create questions for others.

Our platform hosts the top USABO participants, used by several in the top 50 as well as an international biology olympiad gold medalist. See how you stack against the top users, and improve your olympiad skills.

How it works

The home page will show a list of blitzes. Each will be created by a user on the platform. Mitosisphere is a team of problem writers that make many of the questions. Each contest is assigned a rating based on how difficult it is. A blitz with a higher rating indicates more challenging content, dynamically determined by how users performed on the blitz.

After you play each blitz, you can also rate the quality of that blitz out of five stars. Let others know how well made a blitz is so it can get promoted to others. Try to take higher quality blitzes for better practice first. Subscribe to channels that frequently provide high quality blitzes, so you are notified when a new blitz is posted.

Train

Compete

Everyone starts at 500 rating. Based on your performance on the blitzes, your rating will either go up or down. You can see how you stack up against your competitors on the leaderboard.

Different rankings are divided into tiers, starting at bronze III and climbing up to grandmaster. Your username will show off your ranking on leaderboards and your profile, so climb the tiers to show off your progress to your friends.

During the first 15 unique blitz attempts, a blitz has yet to be rated by our system. You can take these blitzes for a 2x rating boost during this stage, and your rating will be updated automatically after the threshold of 15 unique attempts is reached. After this, the contest is autorated, with its rating still dynamically changing based on the skill of the people who take it and their performance.

Problem of the day

Every day is a new problem, curated by a team of problem writers who have historically been among the T50 USABO participants. These can span over any available topic, and range in difficulty. For more practice, you may view the archive that contains hundreds of problems and take each of them. Problems are tagged by their topic, so you can filter by a specific category such as Anatomy and Physiology to practice the areas you have just learned or are weakest at.

Every day you take the daily problem, whether you get it right or wrong, you will keep your streak alive. One day missed will set you back to 0, so make sure to do the daily problem each day. The most devoted participants can be seen on the streak leaderboard. Try the daily problem every day to climb the streak leaderboard. Content is learned best by spaced repetition, so by challenging yourself each day, you will retain information for semis or opens.

Face off against your friends

On the compete tab, you can challenge your friends to a blitz. You will first take the blitz and get feedback on your performance. They will have 48 hours to respond. If they get more questions right, then they win, and vice versa. Time taken is a tie breaker if you both get the same accuracy.

Challenging your friends will apply the same rating update as if you were taking the contests on your own, but provide a 1v1 aspect. You will be able to track your record against each of your friends, allowing you to see who is truly better at bio.

Create

Track your progress