44th INTERNATIONAL CHEMISTRY OLYMPIAD

The selection process is open to all post-16 students and involves a challenging two hour written test of chemical knowledge. The questions posed often stimulate much debate on, and enthusiasm for, chemistry - raising awareness of what the subject is all about. Tackling the paper also provides a good opportunity to develop some of the skills required for study at university and beyond. Gold, silver and bronze certificates are awarded to those students scoring highly.

At BRGS, the RSC Olympiad was held at the beginning of February 2012. Twelve students entered the competition and we were delighted with their results. Bronze certificates were awarded to Dominic Walton, Jordan Dooley and Shannon Pinnington; Silver certificates were awarded to Charlotte Bradbury, Rebecca Shutt, George Platt and Matthew Allcock. The answers given by Will Sharratt were deemed worthy of the Gold certificate!

Special mention must be made of George Platt (silver) who is only in Y12 and also of Will Sharratt as only 7% of students were awarded a gold certificate in the UK.
George has also entered the University of Oxford’s Corpus Christi schools science competition and he eagerly awaits the final decision along with Asanish Kalyanasundarum (Y11).

The competition is designed to stretch and challenge the more able sixth form Chemistry students and involves some MChem level questions.
George and Asanish are also on the University of Cambridge’s Olympiad leader board. The monthly Chemistry competition is open to students from around the world and goes live at one second past midnight (BST) on the first day of the month (living in New Zealand is an advantage!) We are delighted they are almost in the top 100th in the world in spite of the time difference!!

Asanish has been very busy and also entered the Bill Bryson competition, which this year had an Olympic theme. Afnan Rao (Y12) also produced a document for this competition and we should find out the results before the summer holiday