Rules

Rules of Participation 2025

You may participate in the SOI if you:

• were born on or after 1 July 2005 and in the period from September 2024 to December 2024 you attended for the large part a school in Switzerland which is not above the secondary level (for example, secondary school, vocational school, international school, etc.). If you are Swiss but go to school abroad, you may also participate, but you have to participate in the later rounds at home in Switzerland.
• register on the SOI website as a participant with truthful details.

Junior Round. You are eligible for the Junior round if you fulfill the rules of participation, are born on or after 1 July 2007 and anticipate to be enrolled in a school in the period from September 2026 til December 2026.

Collaboration. Solve the tasks on your own. We strongly encourage you to study from books and the internet but do not copy any solutions directly from these sources. Using the standard library of your language as well as other libraries is allowed as long as we can understand how you solved the task. Submitting code from someone else without quoting can lead to point deduction or disqualification.

Disclaimer. The SOI accepts no liability for damages arising in connection with participation in SOI. Insurance is the responsibility of the participants.

Accessibility

Do you need specific assistance for your participation due to a physical impairment, handicap or chronic illness? Please contact the office of the Science Olympiad. We will do our best to ensure that everyone can participate fairly.

SOI privacy policy (as of September 2017)

These guidelines regulate what we – the SOI and the Association of Swiss Scientific Olympiads (VSWO) – do with your submissions and contact data and what data we publish and pass on to third parties. If you have any questions or uncertainties, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@soi.ch.

Registration details. When you register, we will ask you for your name, user name, date of birth, gender, address, city, e-mail, telephone number*, language skills, school, informatics/mathematics teacher and your T-shirt size* (items marked with * are optional). We use this information for the following purposes:

• Contact. Before, during and after our verification procedures, you will receive information about our events and other scientific competitions by e-mail or by post from us or the VSWO. For example, we send you an e-mail newsletter, flyers and posters on the SOI the following year and ask you to participate in our alumni survey a few years later. If you do not wish to receive any mails from us later, just let us know.
• Schools. We ask you about your school and about your teacher, so we can send them our informational materials in the following years. We inform them about your participation only if you have put in an excellent performance (qualifier for the final, medal, etc.).
• Media. We only provide your contact information (residential address, telephone number and e-mail) to the media with your explicit permission.
• Support partners and third parties. We do not pass on your contact details to our support partners or other third parties.

Particularly sensitive personal data. For participation in our camps and for travelling to international competitions, we will ask you about your dietary habits and health information, for ID numbers, passport photos, passport copies and visa details, as well as contact details for emergencies. We treat this information as strictly confidential and only pass it on to third parties where necessary, for example to airlines, to embassies for visa applications, or to local organisers for menu planning.

Photos and videos. At our workshops and examinations as well as on journeys, we take photographs and film material to capture impressions of the Olympiad. We put these in galleries and as videos online and may label them with your name. We use them for our printed material and display them at our events. We reserve the right to allow third parties (such as the media and support partners) to take pictures and film recordings. If you do not wish to have any photographs taken or films recorded at our events, please let us know in advance in writing at info@soi.ch.

Competition data. We store in our internal archive the programme code you write in our competitions as well as all written examinations and their corrections and evaluations. We do not publish your code and exam submissions, but we reserve the right to use them for internal training purposes.

Rankings. For each of our competition rounds, we create a ranking list with your name, city and school, as well as your score and ranking. We make these ranking lists publicly accessible on our website for an unlimited period. It is our opinion that a position at the lower end of the SOI ranking is also an excellent achievement. The Olympic idea “the important thing is taking part” is what counts.

Media releases and reports. During and after examinations, travels and camps, we prepare media reports and reports consisting of the results, photographs and quotes from the participants. We publish these online and send them to the media, schools and our support partners.

Website usage. We use cookies on our website to track visitor behaviour. These are independent of your user profile and are not linked by us.

Changes. We reserve the right to revise these guidelines once a year. However, we will never extend the scope of use of recorded data beyond that previously agreed.