The Reading Olympics competition is the culmination of a program that has teams of students reading books from a prepared list for several months prior to the final event. Each team consists of 8 to 16 students who agree to read from groups of 20 books appropriate for their age and reading level. The book lists are prepared the previous year by interested teachers and librarians. During the competition evening, all teams participate in three rounds of questioning. Teams are never eliminated. At the culmination of the event, all students receive a ribbon, determined by the number of points their team earned during the evening. More than 700 volunteers work as moderators, scorekeepers and team leaders during the competition.