By Trang Le
Fountain Valley High School’s Academic Decathlon team participated in a scrimmage on Saturday, Nov. 23.
At the Academic Decathlon scrimmage, teams from various high schools around Orange County gathered to compete at the Orange County Dept. of Education. While the scoring of the scrimmage does not determine placing in the actual competition, students were given a chance to test their current amount of knowledge in the respective subjects that they study.
“The scrimmage gave me an insight on how the competition works – with both the difficulty of the tests and the structure of the competition,” said Kristen Law (‘16).
Fountain Valley High School’s Academic Decathlon team, consisting of twenty four students, had prepared for the competition by meeting after school twice a week and independently studying at home.
“You can’t cram the material because there’s a whole ton of information in the subjects that we study,”said Jayne Yokoyama (‘14), a two-year member of the team. “You learn that you need time to remember the information and understand it all for the competition.”
At the scrimmage, the team had a large range of individual scores. Many first-years had some difficulty throughout the competition, but others, such as Umbreen Ali (’14) were well-prepared for the testing.
“I was actually really surprised that I did so well,” Umbreen stated. “I look forward to seeing how much I improve personally and how much we improve as a team by the time the real competition comes around.”
Academic Decathlon is a nationally recognized high school academic competition that gives students from all academic levels the chance to compete. Students compete in a total of ten subjects: art, economics, language and literature, math, music, science, social science, essay, interview, and speech.
Competitions will be held on Jan. 25 at Tustin High School and Feb. 1 at Westminster High School.
