Quiz Kids : Teen-Age Decathletes Give Brains a Workout at County Competition

OK now, listen up and put away the family almanac and encyclopedia. Here’s the question. You have 7 seconds to answer. Take all the time you need.

In the Northern Securities Case, Theodore Roosevelt took bold action against:

A) John D. Rockefeller

B) J.P. Morgan

C) Andrew Carnegie

D) Philander C. Knox

E) J. Paul Getty

Stumped? Let’s try it again. But this time put yourself in the middle of a high school auditorium full of screaming teen-agers and parents and try to answer the question. Again, you have 7 seconds. And by the way, you’re a junior or senior in high school, so you can forget about anything you learned in college or graduate school.

Welcome to the Orange County Academic Decathlon, open to high school juniors and seniors well versed in such common teen-age talk as geometric sequences, figurative language, Pythagorean theorem and the works of Eadweard Muybridge .

(The answer to the question, by the way, is J.P. Morgan, and that was one of the easy ones.)

The 21st annual county finals in the decathlon, which was held Saturday at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, will determine which school will represent the county in the state finals in March. More than 230 students from 26 Orange County high schools competed for the title, going against such pre-tourney favorites as Foothill High in Tustin, winner 3 out of the last 4 years, defending champion Los Alamitos and host Sunny Hills.

The winner will be announced in January at a banquet in Costa Mesa.

Lest one think this is some kind of high school version of the popular quiz show “Jeopardy!,” consider some of the questions. It’s enough to make Alex Trebek blush.

In the fine arts category, students were hit with questions about Emile Zola and Realism, fin-de-siecle disillusionment, Honore Daumier and animal locomotion. In economics, there was Karl Marx and the founding of modern socialism, Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party and the ever-popular municipal ownership of utilities.

In the dreaded mathematics test, students who did well knew at least something about algebraic methods, permutations, first and second derivatives and the angle properties of polygons.

Then there’s an unrehearsed speech before a group of judges, a couple of essays and the high-pressure Super Quiz, the final event of the day in which students answer questions in a packed gym before a jury of their peers. This is not for the intellectually faint of heart.

Susie Liberman, academics events coordinator at the county Department of Education, explained that each school’s nine-person team was composed of three honor students, three “scholastic” (B) students, and three “varsity” (C) students.

“What is wonderful about this is that you have your very bright kids and then you have others who maybe just haven’t been motivated,” she said. “Once the C students get involved with the others, they begin to excel. It’s a wonderful experience.

“I really salute these kids. This is a huge undertaking. They spend a lot of time getting ready for this.”

At many schools, the selected teams meet several hours before school, after school and even on weekends to study for the tests. Most schools have volunteer coaches, usually a teacher but sometimes a parent, who guides the team through study drills.

Larry Minne, an English teacher at Foothill High, has been that school’s coach for more than 10 years. When he speaks of his team, he does so in almost reverent tones.

“This competition represents the county’s best,” Minne said. “There is a lot of pressure but also quite a bit of prestige. These tests are very difficult. And the math quiz, well, it’s a killer.”

One benefit of the competition, Minne said, is that students often end up studying subjects in their off hours that they have not been exposed to in the course of normal school hours.

“Like the arts,” he said. “Most kids never get a chance to study art or music. But since it’s a subject here, they are exposed to it and do background work on it. Some of them develop a real interest in art or music and go on to study it further.”

As a measure of the type of student who competes, Minne’s Foothill seniors from last year went on to study at Brown University, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, UCLA and UC Berkeley.

“They are bright kids,” he added.

The students themselves seem to take it all in stride.

“It’s interesting, but a lot of it is knowing how to prepare,” said Robert Kovacer, a Foothill junior.

Thrown by Science Quiz

Kovacer conceded he was a bit thrown by a science quiz in which “they produced a collage in black and white with arrows and asked us about what physical properties they represented.”

Michael Tu, 17, a Los Alamitos senior, said the toughest part was the succession of 30-minute tests with only a 5- or 10-minute break between them.

“They give you test after test and you don’t have time to rest,” he said. “I do best in the Super Quiz. I scored (a perfect) 1,000 in the regionals.”

Steven Haguewood, a Costa Mesa lawyer and the master of ceremonies for Super Quiz, tried to put in all in perspective. He participated in the county’s first decathlon in 1968 and won top individual honors in the “scholastic” competition.

“Back then nobody had any idea what to expect,” he said. “There was really very little preparation. Now, schools spend a considerable amount of time preparing.”

The students who excel, Haguewood said, are not necessarily the smartest ones but the most well-rounded ones.

“You might have someone who is very good at math or science who doesn’t do so well in impromptu speech,” he said. “You have to know a lot about a lot of things.”