The results are in and local students are heading to Modesto to
see who’s the smartest in the state.
The results are in and local students are heading to Modesto to see who’s the smartest in the state.
Students on the San Benito High School Academic Decathlon team left for Modesto Thursday night for a weekend of brain teasers – they’re participating in the California Academic Decathlon.
Since the SBHS team is the only one in the county, it automatically goes to the state competition. But to give students practice, coach Amy Brown had team members compete with students and schools in Fresno. This gave the first-year team competition experience.
“It’s good that we went. It lit a fire underneath some of the students,” Brown said.
Students on the academic decathlon team attend the school’s zero period from 7:20 to 8:22 a.m. Tuesday through Friday. They take the class on top of their six regular courses.
The trip to Fresno also gave Brown the criteria to whittle down the team of 12 to the maximum of nine for the state competition. School teams are divided into three categories – honor, scholastic and varsity, each of which has three members. Students on the honor team usually have a GPA of 3.5 to 4.0, scholastic 3.0 to 3.5 and varsity 3.0 and under.
Students representing the county include: honor – sophomores Crystal Achilles, Anna Dennis and Nick First; scholastic – sophomore Alex Marks and senior Krissy McAlpine; varsity – sophomores Jake Mahan and Mason Dungy and junior Valerie Morgan.
Because this is SBHS’s first year competing, the team is automatically placed in Division III and competes only against other Division III teams – which is good, Brown said.
“It’s our first year and the Division I teams are very good,” she said in January. “… I told them to rest during the holiday break because when they come back it’s going to be one and a half months of cramming.”
The team was awarded points from the Fresno competition. In Division III, they scored 24,726.6 points out of a possible 60,000. The students did not take the essay part in Fresno – a possible 6,000 points missing.
Each of the team members has the opportunity to score 1,000 points in each of the 10 categories for a possibility of 10,000 each. The best two scores from each group – honor, scholastic and varsity – are added to come up with an overall winner.
The team subject areas in the decathlon are math, economics, social science, music, art, language and literature, super quiz, essay, speech and interview. The last three are more subjective and are graded by judges while the first seven are objective – the competitors take multiple-choice written tests, except for the super quiz, which is held in front of an audience.
The score of 24,726.6 puts the team at next-to-last place across the state. But when Brown compared the score to similar counties in the same division that scored around 35,000, the SBHS team didn’t do so badly, she said.
Ventura County’s Moorpark High School placed first in county scores with 49,693 points, the highest score in the country.
The students arrived in Modesto Thursday night. They will test all day today, participate in the speech, interview and super quiz Saturday and attend the awards ceremony Sunday.
Several awards for each team and team member in each of the three divisions are up for grabs at the state and national competitions.
“I know some kids will get awards, some of them,” Brown said.
The United States Academic Decathlon is April 23-26 in Erie, Penn. For more information, go to www.academicdecathlon.org.
