The 2020-2021 USAD China concluded on February 3rd, 2021. The four SHSID teams of 34 students from Grades 9 and 10 managed to carry home 16 bronze, 15 silver, and 8 gold medals. In the Super Quiz section, Team 21 won the 2nd place. Overall, the four SHSID teams won the 5th, 6th, 7th and 10th place. Team 19 made it into the USAD National Finals. The most notable individual decathletes are gold-medal winning (Scholastic) Sarah, silver-medal winning (Scholastic) Angela, silver-medal winning (Varsity) Maya, and bronze-medal winning (Scholastic) Gwen. SHSID has been awarded the “Outstanding Achievement Award” and the “Holistic Education School” due to its excellent performance for 6 consecutive years.

United States Academic Decathlon is a prestigious academic competition. Each team is made up of 6 to 9 students coming from three groups (Honor, Scholastic and Varsity). With 10 subjects of essay, art, literature, music, math, science, social science, interview, speech, and economics, decathletes must excel in not one but all of these subjects to achieve high scores. Only six scores per team are counted for the team ranking, coming from the top 2 Honor decathletes, top 2 Scholastic decathletes, and top 2 Varsity decathletes.

For the reason of epidemic prevention and control, USAD China Organizing Committee changed original offline competition in Hainan to online format. The 2021 topic is “Learn from the Past, Lead to the Future”. This competition not only examined students on the knowledge level, but also enabled them to acquire interdisciplinary learning ability and achieve team cohesion. Well done SHSIDers!

(Written by Yiwei He Pictures from USAD online awarding ceremony)