A guide, written down carefully.

The rules of the PhysicsBowl are all published. They are also spread across a dozen pages, written for American teachers, and easy to misread from six thousand miles away. This site exists to close that gap.

It is written for the students who sit this American exam at a test centre in China, in English, alongside an ordinary school year — and for the parents and physics teachers organising it around them.

Written for the students actually sitting it

The organisation behind the contest

Who AAPT are

The contest is theirs. This site simply explains it.

The PhysicsBowl is run by the American Association of Physics Teachers, a membership body for physics educators based at 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, Maryland. AAPT sets the paper, fixes the rules, defines the regions, scores the entries and decides the awards. Everything binding about this contest comes from them.

The contest has been running for a long time by the standards of school competitions. AAPT publishes its own line of editors of record stretching back to 1985 — eight of them across four decades — and continues to publish an annual Global Top Scores list. That continuity is the strongest thing that can honestly be said about the contest’s standing: it has been set, scored and published by the same professional body, year after year, for a very long time. See history for the full record.

Our relationship with AAPT: none

PhysicsBowl is a contest of the American Association of Physics Teachers. This site is independent: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or operated by AAPT. We use their names only to describe the contest this guide is about. Official contest information is published at aapt.org, and if anything here ever contradicts them, they are right and we will fix it.

Editorial standards

How this site handles facts

Four rules we hold ourselves to. They are the reason to trust anything here.

Every fact traces to something AAPT published

The format, the divisions, the region list, the proctoring conditions, the award structure, the fee — all of it is a plain reading of AAPT’s own pages. Where we are giving our reading of something rather than quoting a rule, we say so. If we cannot show where an answer comes from, we do not assert it.

Derived numbers are labelled as derived

The figure of 67.5 seconds a question appears throughout this site. It is not published by AAPT; it is 45 minutes divided by 40 questions, and it is described that way everywhere it appears. Arithmetic is useful. Passing arithmetic off as a published rule is not.

Where nothing is published, we say so

At the time of writing AAPT has not announced the 2027 dates. This site therefore says that plainly, in the same place a date would otherwise sit, rather than estimating from last year and hoping. An empty field with a date on the check is more useful than a confident guess.

The same applies at a smaller scale. AAPT groups the five China regions as codes 15 to 19 without publishing which number belongs to which region, so we present the grouping and tell readers to confirm their own code — rather than offering a mapping that could send a school into the wrong region.

No unsourced statistics, and no promises

You will not find participant counts, school counts, country counts, cutoff scores or admissions statistics on this site, because AAPT does not publish them and we will not invent them. You will not find claims that a result here leads to a particular university, because nobody can honestly make that claim.

Some of this replaced older material

This site previously carried figures of the kind described above, along with two contradictory exam dates for 2026 and an outdated fee. Those have been removed rather than restated. If you remember reading something here that no longer appears, that is why.

Scope

What we do, and what belongs to someone else

This	Belongs to
Explaining the rules, divisions, regions and awards	Us — that is what this guide is for
Helping you choose a division and prepare for the paper	Us
Setting the paper, scoring it, publishing results	AAPT
Deadlines, fees, eligibility rulings, proctor approval	AAPT
Taking entries in China, Asia and the Middle East	ASEEDER / SEED-ASDAN
Running a test centre, proctoring, issuing certificates	Your school or centre, under AAPT’s conditions

We also offer preparation courses and a registration service — entries arranged through the official channel for your region. Both are commercial services of this site’s publisher, entirely separate from the contest and from AAPT, and neither confers any advantage in the contest itself — see course recommendations and registration. Everything else on this site is free to read and always will be.

Corrections

Tell us when we’re wrong

A guide like this is only worth reading if it is corrected when it drifts. Rules change between cycles, and a page that was accurate last season can quietly stop being so. If you find something here that does not match what AAPT publishes, or what your school has been told, we want to know — corrections are acted on, not filed.