Honors, Scholastic, and Varsity. Three divisions in the same team, and yet 23 first place awards overall. How can a phenomenon like such be possible?
Academic Decathlon (AcDec) is a high school club that studies ten different categories, such as Economics, Literature, and Art of their assigned theme. This year, the theme is the Roaring Twenties and decathletes use all of the first semester of school to study for their competitions.
All three divisions compete within their own division, such as Honors students versus Honors students, instead of mingling with another. The way these divisions work is based on GPA. Students with a cumulative GPA of 3.8-4.0 are placed in Honors, 3.2-3.79 are Scholastic, and anything below a 3.2 are placed in Varsity.
On Wednesday, January 28th, MCHS’s AcDec team competed at Grundy Center High for the regionals competition. After eight tests, one interview, and one speech, the decathletes’ scores were finally announced.
Between two large schools and three small schools, MCHS came out as first large school and second overall.
Kaitlyn Thangaraj (‘26) placed first in nearly every category under the Honor’s division, making up the majority of AcDec’s final score, with Sofia Ahari (‘26) right behind her. The highest test scores overall were 940 out of 1,000 in Science and 840 in Art, both by Thangaraj.
After the tests, students were feeling really good about their effort in Academic Decathlon, including Ryleigh Penn (‘26). “It felt really rewarding,” said Penn. “There’s a lot of benefits that come from it, and there’s a lot of experiences you gain from it.”
As well as the tests, speeches, and interviews, there is a Super Quiz that the A teams participate in for each division. The Super Quiz is a question-based game similar to Jeopardy! where students compete against the other teams by answering 13 questions and attempting to get the highest score.
Charles Hines (‘29) is brand new to the team this year. Even so, having made it to the A team, he joined his sister Julia (‘27) and Rain Sanchez (‘26) for the Super Quiz.
“In my opinion, it went decent,” said Hines when asked about his first experience. “Probably [placed] third for the first round, tied for the second.”
Hines’ assumption turned out to be quite accurate. At the end of the Super Quiz, scores were released. It was announced that MCHS placed second overall with a total of 20 questions answered right between all three divisions.
After the Super Quiz, all decathletes from each school waited until the final scores for each of the ten categories were announced. The suspense was painful. Yet in the end, MCHS came out on top due to the hard effort of every decathlete.
The next step will now be going to the state competition that takes place in Waterloo late during March 5th and 6th. After that, the top scoring students will hopefully be going on to Nationals in the spring. As it stands, more is yet to come for MCHS AcDec.
