![Bass Clef Choir members Zion Ondoma, Henry Hansen, and Zerik Nicholson harmonize vocals while singing "Prayer of the Children". “[It’s] a piece dealing with the Bosnian conflicts of the ‘90s,” said Associate Director of Choral Activities Matthew Jensen, “but is applicable to what's happening today all over the world.” The students will perform the song during Large Group Contests in Cedar Falls in May.](https://riverhawkpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20260414_111618-1200x554.jpg)
On March 5th and 6th, Saydel High School hosted the MCHS Academic Decathlon team and 19 others for the state competition. On the first day, coaches were frustrated by the multiple zeroes out of 1000 that students’ essays were scored with. On the second day, MCHS’s own were shocked to see Kaitlyn Thangaraj (‘26) get her zero fixed to a 775 after much confusion about the many zeroes.
“If recognition was given to the correct individuals in the first place, it could’ve definitely saved everyone a lot of stress and confusion,” said Thangaraj about the scoring. “I hope that in the future, the Directors take complaints from coaches with more urgency to avoid another instance like this.”
“However,” Thangaraj continued, “Sometimes things go wrong, and I think that the effort that was taken to award the correct prizes is also admirable.”
There are three prompts from which a competitor may choose to write about only one within 50 minutes. The prompts this year focused on the Literature category, Social Science category, and the Music category from which decathletes had studied.
Normally, zeroes are given out to essayists who wrote off-topic from their chosen prompt and did not follow the required form of five paragraphs. Yet this year multiple zeroes were given out to students who did one or the other instead of both, resulting in four out of the nine main team Riverhawks getting a zero on their essay
In a personal apology email, Dan Nizzi, the Academic Decathlon Iowa State Director, wrote he was “sorry from the bottom of his heart” but would not be changing the winners announced at the Awards ceremony on March 6th. “I would like to personally apologize to Kaitlyn Thangaraj, Mason City, and all teams for this mistake that happened under my supervision,” he said.
Thangaraj will be going onward to the National competition for AcDec in Garden Grove, California during April 23-25th along with two other Riverhawks Julia Hines and Sofia Ahari.
Coaches Jeffrey Hines and Allia Yarrow, together with other coaches, drafted up an email concerning the issue of current and future scoring. Hines himself wrote that the way essays are scored in only on-topic or form categories does not measure all of the essay itself.
“Our decathletes are required to study hundreds of pages of material for the entire competition, and could draw upon their memory of that for their essay along with anything in their prior knowledge,” said Yarrow. “So a judge could theoretically score a perfectly on-topic essay a zero because they don’t have all the information available to our decathletes.”
The goal of said email was to convince judges to actually read and thoroughly score every essay instead of focusing on only one particular part of the rubric. The three Riverhawks going to Nationals can only hope that the email convinces judges to up their games come the day of the competition.
