Hershey High School is planning to assemble its first ever Academic Decathlon team to compete during the 2023-24 school year.

Hershey’s team will be organized by HHS English teacher Derek Dietz, who was a member of Decathlon when he was in high school.

Academic Decathlon is a high school competition created by the United States Academic Decathlon, a non-profit with the goal to “promote learning and academic excellence.” 

Students who participate in Academic Decathlon study and master information about ten different subjects. After learning as much as they can, teams go off to compete at regionals, states, and even nationals.

Competing teams consist of nine students: three students from each of the three GPA levels. Anyone is welcome to study the material and take the qualifying exams. The students with the highest scores will be the ones moving on to the official competition.

Every member of the team has to be knowledgeable about all of the subjects: art, music, language/literature, science, social science, economics, and mathematics. On top of that, they must also be able to give speeches, complete an interview, and write an essay.

The decathletes take tests on each of the subjects. The tests exclusively use questions that have answers that can be found within the resource guides offered to teams.

While the Hershey team won’t be competing until the 2022-2023 school year, the team will begin studying now.