USA Biology Olympiad effort led by Graham Walker, Julia Khodor, and Dina Gould Halme Last year, the Center for Excellence in Education asked MIT's President, Chuck Vest, to serve on a Blue Ribbon Committee to design a National Biology Olympiad. Presumably because of his HHMI Professorship, Chuck contacted Graham and asked if he would help with this effort. He replied that he would, and offered to involve the HHMI Education Group. As a result, we were invited to a meeting held in Boston to grade the several hundred exams from the second round of the first National Biology Olympiad. However, while grading, we all spoke up because we felt that there were fairly serious problems with the design of a number of the questions on the national exam. For example, there were significant ambiguities associated with some of the questions, and some questions awarded very substantial marks for rote memorization, even if the students failed to understand the concept being tested. Bill Stewart and his colleagues at the Center for Excellence in Education were impressed with the input from my Education Group members and asked if we would help design the questions for this year's National Biology Olympiad. Thus, the unanticipated consequence of this activity is that Graham is now a member of the Advisory Board for the National Biology Olympiad and his Education Group will help write the questions for this year's exam. In addition, when the committee came to Cambridge again and Dina and Julia gave a presentation on how to write unambiguous questions and how to use the Biology Concept Framework as a guide to writing questions that focus on understanding rather than memorization. Center for Excellence in Education - USA Biology Olympiad