All-Russian School Olympiad 2026: stages, dates and what a final diploma gives

The olympiad, its legal procedure and who organises each stage

The All-Russian School Olympiad, ВсОШ in Russian, is the country's largest school subject competition. The official portal kept by the Centre for the Olympiad Movement says more than 6.5 million children take part every year. Its rules sit in the Procedure approved by Ministry of Education order No. 678 of 27 November 2020. The latest amendment, order No. 551 of 3 August 2026, was registered by the Ministry of Justice on 2 September 2026 and published on the official legal information portal the same day.

Each stage has its own organiser, which is why dates differ from town to town. According to the portal, local government education departments run the school and municipal stages, each region's education authority runs the regional stage, and the Ministry of Education runs the final. So the school's olympiad coordinator, not a national website, is the first person to ask about a local date. What follows describes the All-Russian School Olympiad 2026/27 as it stands on 19 October 2026.

Four stages of the 2026/27 season and their deadlines

The olympiad climbs through four stages: school, municipal, regional and final. The portal's answers repeat the deadlines set by the procedure. The school stage must end no later than 1 November, the municipal stage no later than 25 December and the regional stage no later than 1 March. The final runs from mid-March to the end of April and closes with an order approving its results, no later than 30 June. Wikipedia gives the usual rhythm as September–October, November–December, January–February and March–April.

Grades narrow as the stages rise. In the wording of paragraph 6 as amended in August 2026, the school stage uses tasks written for grades 5 to 11, with Russian and mathematics open from grade 4; the municipal stage is for grades 7 to 11, and the regional and final stages for grades 9 to 11. The portal's subject list runs from mathematics and Russian to law, art and physical education, with six foreign languages; counting those separately, Sirius speaks of 24 subjects.

The school stage on Sirius: six sciences from 22 September to 23 October

Six school-stage subjects, mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy, run online on the Sirius.Kursy platform of the Sirius educational centre. Its 2026 page gives the window as 22 September to 23 October 2026 for grades 4 to 11, with the regions that applied split into four groups with their own days. Astronomy opened the season on 22 to 25 September, physics followed on 29 September to 2 October, and mathematics ran on 13 to 16 October.

Computer science comes last, in four profiles: robotics, programming, information security and artificial intelligence. Its tours fall between 19 and 23 October 2026, so some pupils are still writing today. On a tour day the tasks are open from 8:00 to 22:00 local time, and each pupil enters with an individual code issued by the school.

The Sirius group list names 83 regions plus Baikonur; Moscow is not among them and follows its own schedule. The other school-stage subjects are set by local organisers. Sirius reports that in 2025 its school stage ran in 83 regions, every third pupil in grades 4 to 11 took part, and more than 5 million papers were written.

Pass marks, grade choice and the end of repeat entries

Moving from the school stage to the municipal one depends on points set locally. The portal says the number of winners and prize-winners at the first three stages follows an organisational and technological model approved by the local or regional education authority. St Petersburg shows how this works in practice: its Education Committee order No. 1234-r of 9 October 2026 recommends that the district administrations approve, for every subject and grade, the school-stage score needed to enter the district stage.

Grade choice matters. A pupil may write tasks for their own grade or an older one, and under the August text a pupil who goes through on older tasks keeps that grade or a higher one at later stages. The portal's example: an eighth-grader aiming for the regional or final stage should choose grade 9 tasks or higher from the school stage, since those two stages only have tasks for grades 9 to 11.

Order No. 551 also adds a sentence that changes planning: the same participant may not take part in the same stage of the current school year in the same subject more than once. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, describing the draft on 16 July 2026, explained that in subjects with several profiles, such as computer science and technology, a pupil would have to pick one. Families who planned two profiles should ask the school coordinator how the rule is applied locally.

The road to the final stage and last year's winners

The final stage has its own entry rule. The portal explains that the pass mark for it is set by the Ministry of Education every year for each subject and grade or age group, and that winning the regional stage does not by itself give a place in the final. Invited participants are those who reached the pass mark at the regional stage, the winners and prize-winners of the previous year's final, and participants sent under a quota.

The quota is for regions where nobody reached the pass mark in a subject: the region may then send its best regional-stage participant, if that person scored at least 50 percent of the ministry's pass mark. Awards in the final are capped as well: winners and prize-winners together may not exceed 45 percent of the invited participants in a subject, winners alone may not exceed 8 percent, and nobody who scored under half of the maximum can be named a winner or prize-winner.

A draft is not a signed order. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported on 16 July 2026 that the ministry's draft proposed, from 1 September 2027, to stop letting last season's winners and prize-winners skip earlier stages. The text of order No. 551 published on 2 September contains no such item, and as of 19 October 2026 the portal still lists last year's final-stage winners among the invited participants.

What a final-stage diploma gives at university admission

The main reward is in the federal law on education, No. 273-FZ. Part 4 of article 71, as published by the KonsultantPlus legal database with the changes in force from 1 September 2026, gives winners and prize-winners of the final stage the right to be admitted without entrance tests to bachelor's and specialist programmes that match the profile of the olympiad. The right lasts for four years following the year in which the olympiad was held.

Each university, not the law, decides which programmes match, so the admission rules of the chosen university are the document to read, and an unusual case is worth checking with its admissions office. The portal adds that regions, municipalities, companies and individuals may also set cash awards for gifted pupils.

Where school-stage results appear and how appeals work

For the six Sirius subjects the rules fix the timetable. Text and video solutions appear within 2 calendar days, and preliminary results open with the participant's code after 7. Questions about scoring are accepted for 3 calendar days after that, through the school organiser, who passes a well-founded one to the regional coordinator; a regional appeals commission answers within 2 days and may forward it to Sirius experts, who also have 2 days.

If the experts widen the set of correct answers, the papers of all participants are rescored, not only the one that raised the question. Final results are summed up separately for each grade 14 calendar days after the tour and published in the school's personal account. Questions about the content of tasks, the criteria or the method of scoring are not considered at all, so an appeal has to show that a correct answer was not counted.

For other subjects and later stages, the portal sends readers to the regional olympiad operator or, where there is none, to the regional education authority's website, listed in its section on the olympiad in the regions. The August order also tightened the regional stage: after a recheck, the organiser must change the jury's scores within 2 working days of receiving its results. It also extends the ban on phones, computers, cameras, reference materials and notes in the room to organisers and jury members.

What is still unknown on 19 October 2026 and where to check

Several 2026/27 dates are fixed, but not in one place. Municipal stages are scheduled region by region: in St Petersburg the district stage runs from 6 November 2026, opening with social studies, to 9 December 2026, closing with the artificial intelligence profile of computer science. The regional stage dates are in the ministry's order No. 692 of 8 October 2026, which the portal lists on its page of legal documents for this season.

The final is the open question: as of 19 October 2026 the portal lists no order on its 2026/27 dates and venues. Last season such an order, No. 823, was issued on 19 November 2025, and the pass marks for the final came in parts, the last of them in order No. 235 of 3 April 2026. Until such orders appear, the All-Russian School Olympiad 2026/27 calendar has no final-stage dates.

Three places give the final answer. For local dates and scores, the school coordinator and the regional operator's site. For the six sciences, siriusolymp.ru with its rules and appeal procedure. For anything national, the legal documents page of the official olympiad portal and the official legal information portal, where amendments such as order No. 551 are published.