A Year for the Books!

By: Samuel Busse

The Owensboro High School Academic Team finished off the best year in school history at the State Governor’s Cup this past weekend in Louisville!

To start, getting to Louisville is in and of itself a great accomplishment. Those who reached state first had to place top five in their testing area or top two in Quick Recall or Future Problem Solving at a district competition, then again in a regional competition before finally getting to have a go at the state competition.

Our OHS Academic Team had a fantastic state performance this year. The Quick Recall Team (starters David Daniel, Beckett Gilmore, Orion Brey, and Kaden Blankenship) placed 3rd in the state. This is the best OHS has ever finished in Quick Recall! The Future Problem Solving Team of Claudia Johnson, Kaden Blankenship, Abby Ladwig, and Lucy Doyal placed 9th overall. David Daniel WON Individual Quick Recall and placed 7th in Science. Beckett Gilmore, the returning state champion in Arts and Humanities, placed 9th in the event this year, as well as 3rd in General Knowledge and 7th in Individual Quick Recall.

For context, these competitions are all part of an organization known as the Kentucky Association for Academic Competition Governor’s Cup. KAAC writes all the questions, tests, and essay prompts for the competitions. The events you can compete in include:

Written Composition – You are given as essay prompt and you write a response to it
Future Problem Solving – You are given a problem and you write about methods to find a practical solution to it.
Content Assessments – You are given 50 minutes to answer 50 questions and 10 tiebreakers on your subject area (60 minutes for Math). The subjects include Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, and Arts and Humanities.
Quick Recall – This is a Jeopardy-like game where a moderator reads long questions from the five subject areas and you play as a team of four to try and get more correct than the opposing team. The questions types are toss up and bonuses. Toss ups are open to all eight players, but a team can have only one player buzz in per question. If a player gets a question right, then their team gets a point and the next question is a bonus for them. This means that they get to answer at the end of the question (clues for a question get subsequently easier as a question goes on) before the other team gets to answer.
There were two events that pertain only to the state competition, Individual Quick Recall and General Knowledge. Individual Quick Recall is like regular quick recall except you are separated from your team and competing for yourself in a competition the day before the main eight rounds of Quick Recall. General Knowledge is a test with 10 questions from each subject and two tiebreakers from each subject for a total of 60 questions.

Congratulations to the OHS Academic Team on a great year!