During February 22 to 24, 2018, 40 junior students from Tsinghua High School attendedAmerican Academic Pentathlon（USAP）CHINA 2018 under the guidance of two teachers, Zhu Ying and Lai Jingling. Altogether the group won 24 individual awards covering all the subjects, among which Tian Xinyang of Junior 2 is the biggest winner with three gold medals, one silver medal and a bronze medal, ranking the first of Junior 2. Liu Jiakang from Junior 1 also performed well with one gold medal, one silver medal and one bronze medal awarded, ranking the third of Junior 1. Xue Yuanyuan and Xiao Hanlei entered individual final round. Except for individual awards, Tsinghua High School is also awarded with the best organizer. It is said that two groups (at most two groups) from Tsinghua High School will represent China and attend the upcoming global finals in America.
American Academic Pentathlon, known as USAP, is quite challenging for students. This competition consists of three parts: Objective Test, Super Quiz and Assessment Center. Objective Test covers literature, science, art, mathematics and social science. In Super Quiz part, students are divided into three groups for different functions. Each group needs to answer ten questions and for each question, they will be only given 10 seconds to think. Assessment Center aims to test teamwork. Each group will be given 30 minutes to finish a task together. It also calls for practical ability and creative thinking.
After the competition section, many participating groups illustrated their own school at the offered stand with a given theme, "African". The demonstration from Tsinghua High School ended to win "The most popular stand" award.
At the closing ceremony held on February 24, subject awards, prizes for Super Quiz and for Assessment Center were granted separately. Naturally, Zhu Ying as the leading teacher of Tsinghua High School delivered a speech on behalf of all the participating teams.
USAP is the junior version of United States Academic Decathlon. The latter has a history of about 50 years in America which is treated as an important reference of American colleges and universities when enrolling students. As for USAP, contestants are required to deal with issues covering five areas as mentioned before. This competition calls for multidisciplinary knowledge, high-level teamwork and comprehensive abilities so it was honored as the best comprehensive academic competition for junior school students. Since 2017 the preliminaries and finals have been held in China region to choose the representative of China to participate in the global finals. This year's theme for USAP CHINA is "African". It is said that nearly 1000 junior middle school students of 50 middle schools from all over the country took part in this competition.
Text: Zhu Ying
Picture: Lai Jingling
Reviewer: Zhu Ying
Editor：Administrative Department
Source: English Teaching and Research Group
