L.A. High Leads Academic Decathlon : Scholastics: School apparently defeats El Camino Real in the Super Quiz, but results are unofficial because scoring system malfunctioned.

In an unexpected turn of events at the citywide Academic Decathlon on Saturday, Los Angeles High School’s team appears to have beaten the heavily favored El Camino Real High School team in the Super Quiz event.

The results, however, were unofficial because of a major malfunction with the electronic scoring system being tried out for the first time by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The equipment worked perfectly at the national decathlon last spring, according to Ria Parody, spokeswoman for the district.

Without the scoring system there was no way to officially tally the points of each of the district’s 58 teams. According to the tallies calculated by nervous coaches who shared results with one another, the team from Los Angeles High in the Mid-City area scored 82 or 83 points, El Camino Real in Woodland Hills had 81, and Marshall High School, last year’s national decathlon champions, had 79.

The decathletes in the gymnasium at the Cal State Dominguez Hills suddenly had to switch to writing their answers rather than punching them into keypads. Coaches vigorously tallied their own teams’ scores by having members raise fingers for each question correctly answered.

“We’ve placed as high as third before,” said a bewildered Jim Hatem, decathlon coach for Los Angeles High.

“If we did win, somebody please hold me up,” he said, clutching a table to keep himself from falling over.

The Super Quiz is a game show-style competition in which groups of three members from each of the teams in the school district are asked 15 questions. There are three sets of these trios per team.

One set is called “honors” and is made up of students with A averages, another set is called “scholastic” with students with B averages and the third is called “varsity” with students with C averages. The top two out of three scores are used from each set, so there was a total possible score of 90 for the Super Quiz.

Official Super Quiz results are expected to be announced Monday morning after test booklets are examined by district officials.

Although it is only one of 10 events in the Academic Decathlon, the team that wins the Super Quiz almost always wins the whole competition.

“We nailed this,” said the Los Angeles High team’s Liliana Reyes, 17.

Before the Super Quiz, the 500 decathletes gathered at Carson High School on Saturday morning to empty out their information-packed heads in nine other categories: economics, fine arts, language and literature, mathematics, science, social science, essays, speech and interviews.

The results from these categories are to be tallied over the next 10 days and will be announced at a gala banquet Nov. 28. There, the decathletes will find out which team will place first and go on to represent Los Angeles at the state competition.

Los Angeles is host to one of the hottest decathlons in the nation--seven of the last 14 city champions have gone on to the national competition, and three took first place in the country.

El Camino had been favored to win until Los Angeles High surprised everyone with the apparent Super Quiz victory.

All El Camino coach David Roberson could say as he compared scores with the Los Angeles High coach was: “Well, I know we’ve [at least] got the silver medal for Super Quiz.”