County Students Miss the Cut in Junior High Math Competition

The pencils were down, the tests collected and eighth-grader Laura Dietz sat recovering Saturday afternoon from Mathcounts, an all-day mathematics competition for California junior high school students.

“I don’t think I’m doing so well so far,” said Laura, who attends Serrano Intermediate School in El Toro. “It’s like, two things in a question and if you mess up on one, you’re dead. They’re real hard.”

She and 146 other junior high students from Southern California took several tests Saturday at Cal State Fullerton to find the top math student in the state. An identical competition was held simultaneously at St. Mary’s College in Moraga for Northern Californians.

When the winners were announced later in the afternoon, none of the 13 Orange County entrants had placed in the top four to garner a place on the state team.

Robert Shih, 12, from Malaga Cove Intermediate School in Palos Verdes, placed No. 2 in the statewide competition, making him the only student from Southern California to qualify for the team that will go to the nationals. The three other top scorers were all from Northern California schools--first-place winner Sean Trekhler from Palo Alto, E. Frey from Oakland (tied with Shih for second) and Arthur Shek from Carmichael (third place). The California team will go on to compete May 18 in Washington.

Mathcounts, sponsored by the National Society of Professional Engineers, is aimed at showing students that math can be fun, said Cliff Ishii, a Cypress engineer and state director of the competition. The sponsors hope that by getting junior high students interested in math, they will continue taking math and science in high school and college and become engineers.

Before the final scores were announced, Eric Weiss, an eighth-grader from Rancho San Joaquin Middle School in Irvine, said he hoped he wouldn’t score in the top 10. Top scorers had to go one-on-one in a videotaped quiz round with the other top students.

“I’m getting sick thinking about it,” he said, shortly after eating a hamburger.

The Orange County students competing Saturday qualified for the statewide event after winning a countywide contest in February. Four-member teams from Serrano, Rancho San Joaquin and La Paz Intermediate in Mission Viejo outscored all other county schools.

An eighth-grader from Los Alisos Intermediate School in Mission Viejo, Jae Lee, 14, participated Saturday as an individual because he was the top-scoring student in the county.

During the competition, students received questions in a series of rounds. The first round hit them with 30 questions that had to be completed in 40 minutes. The second round subjected them to questions given in pairs with eight minutes to solve them.

The questions were designed to test knowledge that junior high math students would typically be exposed to, said Joan Gell, a math teacher at Palos Verdes High School who helped write the test, which is being used by all students across the country.

A sample question: Jack and Jill are siblings. Jill has twice as many brothers as sisters. Jack has the same number of brothers as sisters. How many children are in the family?

As each round began, competitors flipped over test booklets at speeds approaching Mach 1. Then brows furrowed and erasers were chewed as the basketball game timer on the wall ticked away the seconds remaining.

“One careless error and you get a handshake instead of a trophy,” said Beverly Mairs, the coach from Malaga Cove Intermediate School.

The contest is meant to be competitive, Ishii said. But the real goal of the event, besides having fun, is to increase the number of engineers in the country, he said.

His company recruits about half of its engineers from outside the United States, he said, mostly from Korea.

“We’re not seeing the kids (in the United States) take the math at the level they need,” he said. “We need to encourage them because we need more home-grown talent.”

After the contest was over, Michael D. Cowan, chairman of the Orange County chapter of Mathcounts, posed a final math question to all those within earshot:

“How do 147 kids go through 200 hamburgers and 236 candy bars when they were allowed only one each?”

Carole Jackson, the math coach for Irvine’s team, beat him to the punch line.

“They have two hands,” she said. “That’s an easy one. Ask any junior high school teacher.”