Hi,
I did the Australian Science Olympiad exam in Chemistry last year so I may be able to help you. There is no 'amount of knowledge' you must have to be accepted into the summer school, as you most likely know, you must get a gold medal (around top 24 students) to be accepted.
In terms of the knowledge you should have in order to give yourself the best chance of achieving a medal, as much as possible of course! But roughly speaking the exam doesn't test depth of knowledge, but rather how you can apply fundamental concepts to new scenarios. You can see the prerequisite understanding in the syllabus provided by ASI.
In the 3 short answer questions, there is always most definitely going to be a 'puzzle solving' stoichiometry problem, possibly involving various variables and simultaneous equations. The other 2 questions will involve other areas of chemistry that you may not have heard of, the question will give you a brief introduction at the beginning and you should be able to answer all the questions even if you haven't encountered the topic at hand before. Of course you could (and probably should) do some further reading to familiarise yourself with some typical areas of chemistry covered on the exam, such as perhaps Chromatography or some Organic Chemistry (wide applicability), in case one of the short answer questions revolves around them, but also to deepen your general understanding. Of course you won't be able to cover every topic, for example, on the 2016 exam one question revolved around Boron Compounds, so really focus on the
understanding aspect. The exam deliberately tries to take students out of their comfort zone by asking them to use archaic units, such as last year's exam, when a question concerning gases gave volume of gas in 'volumes' unit (if I remember correctly).
Some topics seem to be covered more frequently than others I find, such as analytical methods such as Chromatography, Mass Spectrometry, UV-Vis, IR Spectroscopy etc...The stoichiometry short answer question will most definitely be present (they have to test students ability to do stoichiometry!), so find as many tricky ones as you can and understand them as well as you can, especially the previous exam ones (as you have most probably seen/done already). Some topics are basically always tested such as Molecular Geometry (In MC) and Redox Chemistry (In MC and also in SA) so make you sure you have those down pat, you may have noticed these motifs already.
If you want to get into the Summer School you should aim to get all of the multiple choice correct, or at least 13/15. There isn't one set percentage you should aim to achieve around to get into the summer school of course, some years it has been 35%-40% and others it has been 70%-75% depending on the difficulty of the questions, but generally the MP are all do-able.
Other than that it really isn't that easy to prepare for, I don't want to sound bitter but some luck is involved as well. If the exam has a short answer question on a topic you are familiar with and can answer most of the questions intuitively then that is a
Huge advantage, that alone may be enough (ensuring you get some other parts on the other questions). I'm also going to try and do the exam this year, even though I'm in year 12 and can no longer attend the summer school (I got a bronze last year). I think I may have made it if I smashed the stoichiometry question (question 3 instead of the usual question 1), which are usually alright, but this one was particularly tricky and I basically got no where apart from grabbing a couple marks here and there perhaps. So I can't emphasise the stoichiometry aspect enough, get bloody good at that. Also as a side note the required prerequisite knowledge has dropped quite a bit from previous years, so no expectations to understand unit cells etc...
Overall I don't think it's very easy to prepare for and that online Olympiads is rubbish, just past exam questions, ASI should perhaps make more resources available and post last year's exam maybe a bit earlier than a week before the actual exam (although if you send them a couple of emails they may send you a copy of the previous year's exam like they did me). Good Luck
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