With more than a 1000 schools registered to take the British Biology Olympiad (BBO), we are proud to present the writers behind the successful competition: Dr Matthew Johnston (MJ) and Dr Joshua Hodgson (JH)!
Q: What is your history with Biology competitions in general?
MJ: I was a year later than Josh, and took part in 2013 – after being told by my school not to bother as it was too hard! I went to the IBO in Switzerland, and won a Silver medal. Josh and I wrote the IBO 2017 papers together, when the IBO came to Warwick. Since then, we have co-written the BBO papers ever since! In 2020, I helped form the governing body of the biology competitions and chaired the charity until recently.
JH: I took part in the BBO in 2012 when my teacher suggested it to me. I didn’t really have any idea what it was even as I was doing it. I continued stumbling through the rounds until I ended up at the international biology olympiad (IBO) in Singapore. I met MJ in 2013 when my team handed over to the new team. Years later, when I had started my PhD, MJ suggested I help him write the IBO papers for 2017, when the UK was hosting. I also ended up writing large chunks of the IBO papers for 2019 (Hungary), 2020 (Japan) and leading the writing for 2023 (UAE).
Q: How long have you been involved with the writing of the BBO?
MJ: Josh and I broke our teeth with the IBO 2017, and since then we’ve written the BBO questions. I think some 50,000 students have sat our BBO questions now. I find the impact of the competitions really motivating, and I think the BBO has the most opportunity to showcase how fun biology (and botany!) can be to thousands of students.
JH: We gradually drifted into it after 2017. We’d invested so much time and energy into learning how to write good questions for the IBO. From 2021 onwards, we were pretty much the exclusive authors. The BBO is the most fun of the competitions (from my point of view). We can be more imaginative and intuitive than the IBO, but have a larger time allowance and older competitors than the other UKBC competitions, so can do really interesting things.
Q: What inspired you to introduce a team selection round between the BBO and the practical selection rounds at Warwick University?
MJ: As a charity, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to increase access to our competitions. Most notably, we removed all costs of taking part in the competitions. Moreover, we simplified all registrations with a new exam system. Introducing Round 2 follows this same mantra – we want to make sure we find the very best students in the country, irrespective of background. We thought many less privileged students did not realise how good they were in Round 1, nor where the BBO leads to. We wanted to encourage and motivate them, by letting them know that they’re in the top 5% of the country and if you take this round seriously you can represent the country. Moreover, we thought a new format of question and paper would level the playing field (and be really interesting for the students too!).
JH: There used to be a “round 2” for the BBO. This was handmarked which limited the number of students which could take part. At that time, both the BBO and round 2 made greater use of knowledge-based quotations and factual recall, so we abolished round 2 as it wasn’t doing anything useful. In recent years, we’ve thought about how we could build enthusiasm in participants, like myself, who drifted through the BBO without realising they had the skill and the opportunity to go further. The BBO itself now has a huge depth of complex data and problem solving questions, so we still have no need for a BBO round 2, but we thought we could do something to improve access to the IBO. We had an idea that we could share some reading material–a paper that no student will have read before on a topic that isn’t taught–and use it to anchor a team selection paper. We hope this can level the playing field and test different skills. More importantly, it should be a fun exercise for the competitors, and if nothing else, they get to do something an actual scientist would do and learn about something cool. The BBO is much larger than the other national biology olympiads, and MJ created a fantastic online competition platform, so we can throw open this opportunity to a huge number of competitors who do well in the BBO and are eligible for the IBO. The team selection paper, like the BBO, is a work in progress, which we iterate and overhaul each year. Maybe we won’t continue with it, but maybe competitors will grow to love it.
Q: What is your contribution to the team selection process for the IBO?
MJ: Josh and I have completely overhauled the questions you’ll find in the BBO. A diligent searcher will find question papers from 2010, and see them heavily based on knowledge. A swing in the IBO from about 2013, led to much more problem-based questions, where biological reasoning and intuition is being tested (and knowledge isn’t required but does help!). We also introduced a host of new question types to the BBO to make it more interesting (to write and sit) and discriminating.This also allowed us to move away from the A-level syllabus into any biology we found interesting this year as there is less reliance on knowledge in the questions. We’ve also changed the finals, to have practicals more closely aligned to the IBO. When scoring, we have made some differences behind the scenes to make sure there is a fair chance for all genders and backgrounds to reach the IBO.
Q: What is your creative process in finding topics for the competitions?
MJ: I want students to walk away from the BBO thinking, “Wow! That was cool – there’s so much more biology out there!” Personally, the BBO changed me from a biochemist to a botanist, as I explored new topics that weren’t taught at school. I want our papers to encourage that same exploration. Therefore, I purposely make sure that the papers explore topics which are brand new to the students, and techniques which are cutting edge. The fact that you can make plants glow as a readout of environmental stress is so cool, and can be readily understood with a few photos and graphs. We also try to find some new science which has been published this year, so students (knowingly or not) are feeling the cutting edge of research.
JH: Quite random. I keep a list of fun news articles, interesting ideas I come across throughout the year. I’m also a practising biologist (drug development) so I keep an eye out for things which are changing real-world science. With so much experience of competition writing, and a few years of undergraduate teaching, I have a good feel for what students are good/bad at, how they think at different levels. We bought some A-level textbooks and revision guides once to help inspire us, but I don’t think we’ve opened them. I can be quite mean. There’s certain simple topics which students are consistently atrocious at–maybe it’s the teaching–including diversity of life. For example, hardly any competitors can tell me the basics of what makes a plant different from an animal, so there’ll always be something about what has chloroplasts or fixes carbon. I choose topics which I think are important, not necessarily those that get taught or the students say they enjoy most.
Q: What is your advice for aspiring biologists?
MJ: Enjoy! Biology is a vast subject from bioinformatics and modelling to genetics and development. Before going and choosing a university course, read through our papers and think about which parts resonate with you most.
On our papers, the questions in our papers are hard – they have to be to find the top 16 in the country – please don’t let that discourage you. The questions are covering topics and concepts found in 2nd and 3rd year university courses. Use them to explore what else is out there in the field. It’s for this reason we also don’t release the answers to our questions purposefully – we want you to engage with the biology. Most of the questions are little puzzles, founded in some neat biological concepts. You’ll find some common threads of all biology throughout the papers – life being constrained by physics, and finding clever (optimal?) solutions to overcome all problems, always to maximise the fitness of the organism.
Lastly, a tip for our papers, we never not don’t put in no tricks – we don’t think that tests biology very well. What we do do, is look for biology where what you get taught in school is turned on its head – due to the unique environment the organism is found in: there are no absolutes in biology. Often, we walk you through a biological example step by step, and students will get every step right, then draw the wrong conclusion. Trust your gut, and follow the logic to the end!
Good luck with the competitions!
JH: Be open minded and humble. Just because you haven’t seen a topic before, doesn’t mean you can’t apply your intuition. Just because you haven’t learnt the answer, doesn’t mean you can’t figure it out. We rarely expect you to know the answers. Once, at the IBO, a student who we were monitoring in real time was incredible (far better than I would’ve been), definitely on track to come in the top 10 in the world. But he couldn’t figure out the answer to a genetic calculation I’d written with a Professor of genetics. Many of the other competitors sat and worked it through for tens of minutes and many came to the correct answer. But this student put his hand up and insisted the question was impossible, and I’d made a mistake. In the real world, good science comes from understanding that border between impossible and very hard and having the creativity to flex it. Some competitors say our questions are not relevant to the data / information we give, but often we’re testing some fundamental connection. Many competitors jump on the first answer that’s familiar to them, even when it is absurd, or insist they do know how to read a paper, perform an experiment, without taking several steps back to really carefully think about what they’ve been shown. You are very bright, but also very young, so what you are learning, from your education and our competitions, is much more important than how well you are doing. I constantly make mistakes and always come across people who know more than me about some things, but in science, usually no one will tell me (or even know) what the ‘correct’ method is or what lesson I’m missing. Self-evaluation and problem diagnosing is incredibly important. But ultimately, just get creative and have a go (take part and make your best guess at an answer in all our competitions); you might discover something!
Best of luck to all students partaking in the UK Biology Competitions this year!