Science Olympiad (scioly) is a nation-wide middle school and high school STEM competition. Teams of 15 compete together against other schools in 23 events, taking exams ranging from anatomy and physiology, to astronomy, to circuit lab. They also compete in events where they build devices prior to competition and test them on-site, like balsa wood bridges.
I participated in scioly for 6 years, earning over 70 medals, and over 20 first place medals, at all levels of competition. This includes invitational, regional, state, and national tournaments. Since this was such a big part of my high school experience, I wanted to continue my involvement by volunteering as an exam writer. I have since written exams for competitions at UPenn, Yale, PA regional, PA state, and various high school invitationals. I have also been involved with the national astronomy exam writers, and edited exams for several universities across the country.
Scioly exams are not just about testing your knowledge. The best, most enjoyable exams to take are those that challenge your creative thinking, cover a wide range of topics, and teach you something new. I love when I supervise an exam, and a high schooler I never met comes up to me and tells me how much they learned and how interesting they thought my questions were. A top score on my exams should almost never be above a 60%, not because it is an impossible exam, as that would be discouraging. Instead, it should show you how much there still is to learn, and the kinds of puzzles we are trying to solve in our universe.
Below you will find a sample exam I wrote for UPenn in 2020, which is freely available to the public.
The exam has 2 sections:
1. Deep Space Objects (DSO)/theory questions
2. Astrophysics/math problems
Competitors are allowed a computer as a resource during the exam, as long as it is offline. All information and notes must be prepared prior.
Here is the image sheet that goes with the exam.
And here is the answer key.