ACADEC

On a crisp Saturday morning, twenty dedicated students from Ashland High School congregated, along with dozens of other schools, to participate in the first round of competitions for the 2016 - 2017 Academic Decathlon season. The ultimate goal- stay as the defending small school state champions for the umpteenth year in a row. With this in mind, we trekked off to our testing rooms...

For those who don’t know what Academic Decathlon is, it is quite simple. We are an academic team that competes in ten different subjects; Art, Economics, Essay, Interview, Literature, Mathematics, Music, Science, Social Science and Speech. The teams are split up into corresponding unweighted GPA levels of A, B, and C students, thus ensuring an even competition. For example, A students will only compete with other A students and C students will only compete with C students. In the end, the top three scorers in each academic category receive a medal, bronze, silver and gold respectively.

The first competition of the year is nerve-wracking in the sense that it will set the stage for the rest of the year. It is the time for the co-captains and veteran members to prove their mettle and a time for the young blood to show their worth. It is a time of constant anxiety and agony.

As soon as people returned from the testing rooms, the chaotic frenzy to allay one’s owns fears became manifest.

“Did you get the econ question where the Q value was left of the equilibrium?” James Lee, a third year ACADEC-ian, asked hurriedly. I responded with “Yes, it meant that consumers value the good more than the suppliers”.

“YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS” screeched James, scaring other competitors and exemplifying the post exam stress experienced by most ACADEC-ians.

Now, you may be wondering why we were making such a fuss about test scores that wouldn’t even affect our academic lives at all. It is because the spirit of Academic Decathlon isn’t about “is this going to benefit me in the future?”, it’s about the pursuit of excellence and knowledge just for the heck of it. Our thirst for recognition drove twenty completely insane kids to take several brain-melting, energy draining, useless tests all because we crave that feeling of quiet satisfaction of being on top.

And on the top we were. At this recent competition, we had three first timers receive medals which is generally unheard of, Aadish, Brianna and Claire. Junior Aadish Joshi won a gold medal in mathematics and an overall 3rd place medal for A students. Sophomore Brianna Doucette won golds in music and art and a bronze in social science, winning herself a 2nd place overall medal for A students. Freshman Claire Liu won silver in literature. For the rest of the team, sophomore Alon Efroni won a gold in music. Junior Paulina Chumakov won a gold in social science. Junior James Lee won a bronze in art. Sophomore Wilson Lin won bronze in science and social science. Sophomore Andrew Dunn won bronzes in economics and art. Junior Pradeep Manivannan won silvers in mathematics and science and a bronze in economics. Senior Michael Fedorchak won a gold in mathematics, silver in music and bronzes in social science and economics, he also won an overall 2nd place medal for C students. Neeraj Padmanabhan won silvers in social science and science and won an individual silver medal for being the 2nd highest scoring A student. Arthur Wang won golds in science and economics, silvers in music and art as well as a 1st place medal for B students.

Overall our team came in second place for small schools.

According to Neeraj, the other co-captain besides myself, “We have a lot to work on and we definitely need to put in more effort if we want to be the best.”

Look out for our competition results for regionals!