Academic Decathlon Cheaters

[Stained Diviner]

I got asked about this in a Facebook group, but I decided to put my reply here because it's easier to write and more people will see it.

In 1995, there was a big cheating scandal at the Illinois State Academic Decathlon Championship. I was there. Five years later, HBO made a movie about it starring Jeff Daniels, so to the general public this was a bigger deal than what Andy Watkins did. I never saw the movie. Everything here is based on my memory, which might be wrong. Also, while Academic Decathlon still exists, I don't know to what degree it has changed over the years, so I am just giving a picture of how it existed in 1995. Keep in mind this was 1995, so while I had a computer with Netscape Navigator on it, that didn't really help so much because the internet didn't have much information back then.

In Academic Decathlon, students compete in 10 events. 6 of the events are written multiple choice questions that correspond roughly to subjects students take in high school, but there is a theme each year that has a big impact on what gets asked on those tests. I think the theme that year was medical research, so a lot of the English questions were based on the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith and poems along the same theme. The math test was the one least affected by the theme--students just took a multiple choice math test that was based on Algebra II/Precalculus. 3 of the events required judges--an essay, a speech, and an interview. The day ended with a SuperQuiz, in which each student answered 5 multiple choice questions on stage.

Each team had 9 students. Three students had to have unweighted GPAs below 3, and another three had to be below 3.5.

I was in my first year at New Trier. I was 26 when all this stuff happened. About a month after I started coaching Scholastic Bowl the Activities Director, who was a good guy, asked me if I wanted to try Academic Decathlon. He gave me a bunch of materials about it, and I found out that the two dates when we could compete were an invitational at Richards High School, who also hosted a Scholastic Bowl tournament each year, and the State Finals at a City College that no longer exists near Lane Tech. It was part of the City Colleges system that still exists, and it was a community college on the North Side of Chicago.

The State Finals were the same day as IHSA Scholastic Bowl Sectionals. This was before IHSA Scholastic Bowl Regionals existed and before Illinois teams cared about nationals, so the most important date of the year for both competitions was the same date. Our Scholastic Bowl team had two coaches, so we decided he would go to Scholastic Bowl Sectionals and I would go to Academic Decathlon State. All of our Scholastic Bowl starters would go to Scholastic Bowl, and I would recruit other students for Academic Decathlon. I was able to recruit 8 students, which was enough but not ideal because Academic Decathlon drops low scores when computing team totals.

We went to the invitational at Richards, which just used the 6 written multiple-choice tests. I don't remember whether we won, but we at least did OK. Some of the coaches there told me that the Chicago schools take Academic Decathlon very seriously. Because so many Chicago schools wanted to go to State, Chicago schools had to qualify at an earlier competition. This was in contrast to everybody else, where there was so little interest that anybody who wanted to go to State could enter. At the time, Chicago Public Schools did not participate in Scholastic Bowl with one or two exceptions.

I showed up to State having no idea what to expect. I had a bright group of students who had read Arrowsmith and looked at some of the other materials. I knew we wouldn't finish in last place, but I had no idea whether winning was a possibility.

During the competition, which lasts pretty much all day, there is not much for coaches to do, so I spent much of the day talking to other coaches. Some of them took an evangelical approach towards AcaDec--they saw me as a new person wanting to figure things out, so they gave me a lot of information and encouragement. I learned a lot about Academic Decathlon by talking to them.

Many of the people in charge of the State Tournament were affiliated with Whitney Young High School, a CPS magnet school. I lean towards taking a benign interpretation of that fact--Whitney Young had people willing to take on roles, and somebody has to run the competitions. Not everybody shared that interpretation. Whitney Young had won State 9 years in a row heading into 1995. There was also a National Championship that was only open to State Champions, and Whitney Young was consistently in the top 5, though I don't think they ever won. I think that California and Texas were the two biggest Acadec states at the time. I didn't learn this until I was at State.

Several of the coaches I talked to worked at magnet schools, and they took the competition very seriously. One of their classes each day was Academic Decathlon. The team met every day after school. The team was selected in the Spring and met during the Summer to prepare. They brought in speech coaches to help with the speeches, college counselors to help with the interviews, and subject-area teachers to help with the different subjects. The school spent thousands of dollars on study materials each year--some from the AcaDec organization and some from private companies that sold prep materials specifically for AcaDec. New materials had to be purchased each year because the theme changed each year. While talking to them, it became obvious that New Trier was going to finish 5th at best, and I think we ended up 7th, behind all the Chicago schools but ahead of everybody else.

The most serious of the coaches was the Whitney Young coach, though he was a nice guy. His teams came in for hours each day over the Summer. They signed an agreement that they would not join any clubs or teams other than AcaDec, though he allowed them to be on Math Team if they just went to the competitions, which were at night. They worked on weekends. In addition to all that, the coach told me that he had cancer and that 1995 was going to be his 10th and final State Championship--his prognosis was not good. He had an understudy he was handing things off to. He had not yet told his team. It turns out that he actually had several more years to live, but he did not know that at the time.

I do not remember meeting the Steinmetz Coach.

At the end of the day there is the SuperQuiz and the awards ceremony. The awards ceremony was delayed, which surprised the veteran coaches. Up until that point, everything had been running pretty much on time, and people were used to that. (Scholastic Bowl tournaments were the opposite, but that's another story.) The delay was over an hour, and we as coaches were given no reason for it and had no idea why it was happening.

The awards ceremony is long because there are top places in each competition and each division (based on GPA) within the competition. The ceremony was shocking to the veteran coaches because Steinmetz won a lot, which nobody expected. Steinmetz had finished 5th at the City Championship. When they announced the total score at the end, Steinmetz had beaten Whitney Young. At that point, my students and I were ready to leave and get dinner, so that's what we did.

It was difficult for officials to investigate the cheating--the students and coach all claimed that they had worked very hard. Also, a lot of the officials who should have been investigating had direct ties to Whitney Young, which was an obvious conflict of interest. I believe that eventually the national organization decided to allow both teams to compete at Nationals because the issue was unresolved at that point.

The cheating was over the top obvious. There were huge score gains from a few months earlier. Steinmetz had several of the top math scores in the country, and math was the hardest test to study for. Steinmetz said their improvement was due to hard work, but based on my conversations with other coaches during the competition I knew that was a lie. There was no way they had outworked Whitney Young, Lane Tech, and Kenwood.

Eventually people figured it out. The community college stored the tests in a closet for a month or two before the competition. Somebody, probably the coach's wife or possibly a student's parent, had access to that closet. I don't know whether the Steinmetz team had the answer keys, but they had the tests and that was enough. I believe that in addition to that, one of the alternates on the Steinmetz team somehow became a speech judge. Steinmetz was given a ten year ban from AcaDec, and the coach was fired.

My experience with Academic Decathlon ended that day. Part of it was that they made it look so difficult to deal with such an obvious case of cheating. Part of it was that I didn't want to have kids spend hours a day learning study materials that didn't seem so useful beyond the competition. Part of it was that I didn't want to find New Trier students with GPAs under 3 who wanted to spend a lot of time learning extra stuff that wouldn't help them in their classes or after high school.

The Scholastic Bowl team won their Sectional. For me, everything worked out for the best.

[Cheynem]

Apropos of nothing, the film about this is called "Cheaters" and is directed by the guy who also made Blue Crush/Into the Blue.

An extremely long article about the film and the scandal that is very interesting is here:

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics ... g-answers/

[echoes in the Othersea]

Apropos of nothing, the film about this is called "Cheaters" and is directed by the guy who also made Blue Crush/Into the Blue.

An extremely long article about the film and the scandal that is very interesting is here:

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics ... g-answers/

This is a very interesting article. One thing that stands out to me is that the Steinmetz team also cheated in 1994 (completely undetected at the time), and just couldn't get by Whitney Young that time.

On a larger level, it's surprising to me the level of cultural acceptance of cheating seen in this incident. The cheaters openly proclaim that they would cheat again, and a movie is made where they are the protagonists who's robbery and fraud is justified because they're from a working-class school and their opponent is a highly successful magnet school. Also the article mentions that in the movie a student is physically beaten by their peers for revealing the conspiracy to cheat, and the movie sympathizes with the kids doing the violence? That's a little disturbing.

Since Watkinsgate was brought up, it is interesting to compare the media response to this with the media response to that, and how in the broader media Watkinsgate became implicitly connected to Harvard and its status as an elite institution, while here the "Cinderella story" papers over the issue.

Cheaters (the movie) aligns with other Quiz Bowl-esque media depictions like Quiz Show and Starter for 10 in that the protagonist cheats/some portion of the plot is about their cheating, which in the movie sense is for human interest. In this case however, I think that bleeds into how the actual events were portrayed in most media (the Chicago reader article being something on an exception).