Competition Spotlight: Beatty Wins First Place in National Pentathlon Super Quiz

Congratulations to Beatty Middle School’s sixth-grade Academic Pentathlon team and coaches Roxann Bogart and Rebecca Bisso for earning a second-place overall team finish for the second year in a row at the United States Academic Pentathlon National Competition in Nashville, TN. This year's team also won first place in the Super Quiz competition, unseating the multi-year reigning champions, along with fourteen individual medals. Beatty's rise in the sixth-grade Academic Pentathlon world has been swift and dramatic. They began competing in this program in 2015, when, as a new team, they were automatically placed in the lowest Division 7. By 2018, they had worked their way up to Division 1, and for the past three years, they have won the Division 1 first and second place titles for Orange County. In 2024, the top two sixth-grade Academic Pentathlon teams in California became eligible to compete at the national level for the first time, and for both of the national tournaments that have taken place since then, Beatty has competed in and won second place. The competition itself is an intense three-day event that includes an essay, five objective tests in science, fine arts, social science, literature, and math, and an in-person live competition called the "Super Quiz." Each year features a new interdisciplinary theme, and a significant portion of the Pentathlon competition hinges on knowledge of that particular subject area. This year's theme was the Roaring Twenties. The science exam focused on electricity and magnetism, the fine arts exam required the study of music and art from the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, and the social science section encompassed a range of topics spanning events from the 1920s. As part of the literature requirement, students read Born to Fly: The First Women's Air Race Across America by Steve Sheinkin and studied the poetry and short stories of Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Booker T. Washington. The Pentathlon curriculum is woven throughout the school day for all sixth graders at Beatty, but Pentathlon students also meet before and after school twice a week all year long to prepare for these subject-matter exams.