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 a lot of practice is needed.

Many people spend hours reading Campbell's Biology to prepare for the first round of USABO, but are limited by the few past exams that are available. Created by USABO participants, this platform provides a centralized place to take practice tests (called "Blitzes"), as well as create them for others to take.

Our platform hosts many top-tier USABO participants, and is sponsored by many more, including Top 50, Top 20, and IBO medalists.

How it works

The home page will show a list of blitzes. Each is created by a user on the platform. Mitosisphere is a team of problem writers that write 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.

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 25 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 auto-rated, with its rating still dynamically changing based on the skill of the people who take it and their performance.

Problem of the Day

There is a new problem released each day, curated by a team of experienced problem writers (USABO T125 and above). These can span over any available topic, and range in difficulty. You can also view the archive that contains every POTD ever released, 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 the USABO exams.

Create

You can make your own content for others to view as well. You simply enter details about the Blitz, upload a banner image, set a time limit, and put in the questions using our question editor.

Track your progress

Your profile page shows useful stats about your journey. This includes the Blitzes you've played, how you've performed on them, and a graph of your Elo rating.

You can view others' profile pages. You can add friends as well, and view your friends list on the profile page. Currently, the friends feature has no functionality, but it's coming soon! (Challenges? 👀)