Everything Parents & IP Students Should Know About the International Medicine and Disease Olympiad (IMDO)

Q: What does Everything Parents & IP Students Should Know About the International Medicine and Disease Olympiad (IMDO) cover?
A: Origin story, eligibility, exam format.

TL;DR
The International Medicine and Disease Olympiad (IMDO) is an annual, fully-online biomedical contest first held in 2015. Teams of four high-schoolers sit a single 3-hour paper that blends multiple-choice and free-response clinical reasoning. Singapore students usually qualify through the USMDO/IMDO National Selection each May. Beyond medals, the syllabus cross-trains the analytical reading, graph-parsing and dimensional-analysis fluency prized in IP Mathematics & Physics.

Registration quick answer (Singapore): Students don’t enter IMDO directly; join via the official national qualifier (USMDO/IMDO). Dates and fees change each cycle - confirm on the official sites before paying: https://www.imdolympiad.org/ and https://www.usmdo.org/

1 What exactly is the IMDO?

• The IMDO bills itself as the “World Championship” medical-knowledge/problem-solving competition for high-school students and is run each year by the non-profit IMDO Foundation Board.
• The inaugural edition took place in San Diego (2015) and the event has remained online since 2020 to keep costs low for global teams.
• Recent participation averages 25-30 countries; public scoreboards are posted after moderation.

1.1 Why parents of IP learners should care

Biomedical case-analysis forces students to convert prose into flow-charts, crunch proportional data and defend conclusions-skills that map directly onto IP WA graph questions and Paper 4 practical evaluation paragraphs.

2 Exam structure & syllabus snapshot