‘Pop Quiz’ Leaves Reporter Wanting to Make Quick Escape to New York : Competition: The task seemed simple: Take the Super Quiz along with the contestants. Fortunately, he found some students he could match wits with.

It may be time for me to move to New York.

Although I have spent nearly all my life in Southern California, suddenly I feel an affinity for the Big Apple, a sense that there, finally, I may be able to find true intellectual compatibility, even if accompanied by ruder-than-thou attitudes.

Why?

Well, call it fate: On Saturday, a team of nine New York high school students and I tied each other in the United States Academic Decathlon Super Quiz, a rowdy, game-show-like portion of an annual competition that puts millions of adolescent gray cells to the test.

The New York squad and I both notched 17 out of 30 points. But before I elaborate on our achievement, let me make clear that however similar our scores, our motives for taking the quiz were as diametrically opposed as the East and West coasts.

The New York kids, as well 400 others, were vying for the title of what many believe is the country’s premier youth academic team competition. I, although a former academic decathlete, was out to keep my job, having been ordered by sadistic editors not only to report the performance of Taft High School from Woodland Hills but to take the test myself. They thought it would be amusing to see how I measured up against teen-agers barely old enough to need Clearasil.

So here on the Arizona State University campus, I did my best. The Taft students represented California and went up against teams from 43 other states and the District of Columbia. I represented the state of anxiety.

As I sat in the audience, any experience I may have amassed from having served on three academic decathlon teams at El Modena High School in Orange in the 1980s seemed to desert me. Suddenly, I was very nervous, perhaps because I remembered that my team never made it past the county finals, much less into national contention.

Not that the questions on Saturday’s Super Quiz turn out to be hard. In fact, they were remarkably easy.

It’s just that the answers were more difficult.

Try this on for size before you jump to the conclusion that my college diploma was ordered by catalogue:

N. Scott Momaday said his grandfather “saw things other men do not see.” By this he meant that his grandfather had:

1. fantasies.

2. visions.

3. creative ideas.

4. telepathic abilities.

5. psychoses.

See what I mean?

It pretty much went like that all afternoon. Most of the time I was reduced to inspired guesses rather than sure-footed replies. It was all so different from when I competed. There was less pressure then, when the contest was not so widespread--decathlon fever had not yet swept the country--and was not taken half so seriously.

The theme unifying the questions at this year’s Super Quiz was a multicultural one: “A Diversity of Achievers.”

I’m happy to report that there was indeed a diversity of achievers Saturday: The Taft students, who racked up 27 points on one end--finishing a close second behind Texas--and me (and New York, bless ‘em) on the other, whose 17 points didn’t even earn consolation prizes.

Not that we scraped the very bottom, though. Thankfully, a team from Independence, Mo., did that with a score of 10, so this time Missouri had to do without our company.

But when all is said and done, it’s true that my newfound New York friends and I were left looking up the ladder at a good two-thirds of the teams.

Yes, we came in below Mississippi and Alabama, if you must know. But I beat out 20 other states. True, six of those states didn’t field teams; I can’t be caught up on technicalities.

P.S. If you answered No. 2 to the sample question about the American Indian novelist above, you’re right. But if you answered as I did--”Who’s N. Scott Momaday?”--then call me and we’ll go out for a drink before I move to New York.

Henry Chu is a Times staff writer who, he tells his editors, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1990.