The Bee and Bowl events listed below are all played with a buzzer using “pyramidal-style” questions that contain multiple clue, and begin with the hardest clues, and end with the easiest clues. This allows students who know more about the question topic to ring in and score ahead of the other students.

Note that all playoff rounds (and the entirety of the Blitz) will be played with the IAC Bee Championships Playoffs scoring (6, 5, or 4 points for power during the question depending on the buzzpoint, 3 points for a correct answer after the question, -2 for an incorrect response during the question, -1 for an incorrect response at the end of the question). There is no limit to how many students can buzz incorrectly on such questions (i.e. three incorrect answers does not kill the question for the other students who haven’t yet rung in).

The finals and playoff rules will vary from event to event. In all cases, we will announce how many students will make the final before the preliminaries begin, and what the rules of the finals are before the finals begin.

The 2023 Olympiad Syllabus, including descriptions and content distribution for all buzzer-based and exam competitions, is available here.

Required Events

Optional Events – Standard Bee Format

Optional Events – Scramble & Blitz Format

Optional Events – Multimedia Format

The 2023 Olympiad will see the introduction of a multimedia-based Bee format, consisting of a preliminary multiple-choice exam and a buzzer-based final round. For each event below, some multiple-choice questions will be strictly text-based, while others will involve images, video clips, and/or audio clips, depending on the event. For each of these events, the preliminary exam will be timed at 25 minutes, though the number of questions in each exam may vary.