L.A., El Rancho High Schools Earn A’s

Teams from Los Angeles High and El Rancho High School of Pico Rivera outsmarted nearly 120 other public high schools Saturday in the brain-teasing, synapse-burning Super Quiz portion of the Academic Decathlon.

The 18th-annual contest--held in three highly charged showdowns for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the rest of L.A. County’s public schools, and the county’s private schools--were all focused on this year’s national Academic Decathlon theme: the human brain.

Los Angeles High, located west of downtown, won L.A. Unified bragging rights. El Rancho got the top score outside the district, while Alemany High School in Mission Hills topped all private schools.

The Super Quiz is the last of 10 grueling academic tests and is often a good indication of who will win the entire contest. The public schools won’t learn the results of the overall competition until Feb. 11. But private school officials announced Saturday that defending champion Alemany took the overall decathlon title again, beating 20 private schools.

The overall local winners will advance to the state championship in Stockton in March, battling for a chance to compete in the U.S. Academic Decathlon in Orange County in April.

In 17 years, the L.A. Unified winner has gone on to win 10 state titles, five national championships, four second-place U.S. trophies and one fourth-place ranking.

The L.A. Unified schools battled at Los Angeles Southwest College, while students from the other public schools fought it out at Morningside High School in Inglewood.

The Super Quiz is a fast-paced, team relay event. All three of Saturday’s contests, held in gymnasiums where supporters yelled and cheered from the stands, had the excitement of a sports championship. About 1,200 student contestants tested their knowledge of everything from REM sleep to transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Each school sent three teams: Varsity, with a grade-point average of 2.99 or lower; the Scholastic team, with a GPA between 3.0 and 3.74, and the Honors team, with a GPA of 3.75 to 4.0.

The questions included such brain-busters as: “How many lobes does the cerebrum have?” (Answer: 10). “Caffeine works to maintain alertness by blocking what?” (Adenosine.) “The limbic system is required for what?” (Modulation of emotions.)

Los Angeles High, which scored among the top three teams in the past three years of the Super Quiz, beat out 59 teams from L.A. Unified, scoring 58 out of a possible 60 points, nudging out Belmont High School by eight points. Garfield High School came in third.

“We did it again this year and I’m very happy,” said Los Angeles High School senior Lucy Potiyevskaya, 17. “It’s the greatest feeling I have ever had.”

Several students conceded that the pressure was intense.

“I was extremely nervous. I was about to pass out today,” said Patricia Del Real, a senior at John F. Kennedy High School. “I’ve never felt so nervous about anything in my life.”

In the heat of the battle, Rodrigo Hernandez, a sophomore at Birmingham High School, lifted his shirt, revealing the words “GO BHS” painted in bright blue and orange on his chest.

“I want to support my school,” he said. “People have their signs and posters. I have my chest.”

Many students wore matching clothes as a show of school spirit.

Students and supporters from Westchester High School wore matching Hawaiian shirts and khaki pants.

“The shirts symbolize who we are because we are by the beach,” said Westchester junior Abiram Sridhar, 15.

In the showdown between public schools outside the district, El Rancho beat 57 other schools, scoring 48 out of a possible 60 points. Burbank and Palos Verdes high schools tied for second with 46 points each. West High School in Torrance, which won the Super Quiz portion last year, came in third with 45 points.

The students from the public schools outside the district took the quiz in classrooms earlier in the morning. The final answers and scores were announced publicly in the afternoon at the Morningside High gym, which buzzed with excitement as students learned whether their long months of studying had paid off.

Eric Gomez, a senior from El Rancho who competed for the first time, won a gold medal for a perfect score of 10 in one round. He was motivated, he said, by a desire to show up his older brother, an honor student who graduated two year earlier.

“I feel I’m equal to him,” he said of his brother. “I’m going to go home and gloat to him.”

Alemany won the private school Super Quiz with 26 out of a possible 30 points. St. Francis in La Canada Flintridge came in second with 22 points. The third place honors were shared by three schools: Paraclete High in Lancaster, L.A. Baptist in North Hills and La Salle in Pasadena.

Alemany also won the overall decathlon competition with a score of 42,730 out of 60,000 possible points. St. Francis came in second with 41,660; Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School in Hollywood came in third with 32,485 points.

Alemany has won the top spot for the last three years.

Nervous students said the contest was the culmination of months of arduous studying.

“I’m thinking I better get them all right, because I never put this much work into anything,” Chris Jones, 18, a St. Francis senior, said before the contest began.

A few of the mind-benders were so arcane that even the announcer had trouble pronouncing words best suited to a chemistry textbook.

For Alemany senior Nikki Reyes, 18, the most memorable bit of brain trivia she learned was “that fish is good for your brain.” Something about the fatty acids, apparently.

Reyes, who does not like fish, skipped the seafood and instead ate a turkey sandwich before the competition.