HS1 Academic Decathlon I

Academic Decathlon I 155101H Honors Career Ed, Elective The United States Academic Decathlon®, the premier national scholastic competition for high school students, was created to provide opportunities for students to experience the challenges of rigorous team and individual academic competition. Each student competes in ten events: Art, Economics, Essay, Interview, Literature, Mathematics, Music, Science, Social Science, and Speech. Students compose an essay based on a prompt related to the current curriculum. Students also perform a prepared speech and impromptu speech and participate in an interview before a panel of volunteer judges from the local community.

The ten-event academic program strives to foster a greater respect for knowledge, to promote wholesome inter-school academic competition, and to further develop student communication skills. A unique aspect of the United States Academic Decathlon® is that it is designed to include students with diverse academic abilities and achievement levels. Each nine-member team consists of three “A” (Honor division), three “B” (Scholastic division), and three “C or below” (Varsity division) students. Each team member competes in all ten events against other students in his/her division.

The United States Academic Decathlon’s curriculum is an interdisciplinary curriculum in which a selected theme is integrated across six different subject areas: art, economics, literature, music, science, and social science. Students also study mathematics and participate in essay-writing, speech, and interview events. While in most subjects the majority of the topics relate to the overall curricular theme, some topics that cover fundamentals may also be included to encourage a thorough understanding of the subject area as a whole. The USAD mathematics curriculum is unrelated to the theme and focuses on standard high school mathematics topics.