United States Academic Decathlon - Study Materials

Study Materials

The United States Academic Decathlon publishes a variety of study materials for the objective events, the profits from which support the program. The Resource Guides and the Basic Guides constitute the majority of the USAD corpus. An art reproduction booklet and music CD contain a particular year's relevant pieces and are issued separately from the Resource Guides. Study guides are also published and contain detailed topical outlines for each objective subject. These outlines specifically indicate which topics will require independent research beyond the material included in the Resource Guides. USAD also offered Research Guides until 2010, which outlined the basics of what students ought to research. However, in the 2010–2011 competition season, USAD announced that it would be eliminating independent research-based questions from the competitions.

Resource Guides are offered for the art, economics, language and literature, music, science/social science, and Super Quiz events. The Super Quiz Resource Guide is a compendium of previously published articles, whereas the other Resource Guides are composed by individual writers under contract with USAD. The aim of the Resource Guide is to assist students in their study of the topics listed in the subject area outlines. As an example, in 2003 the music topic was Romantic music. Subsequently the Music Resource Guide focused on the development of Romantic music, its characteristics and the influence of the Classical era on the Romantic era. A large part of the guide focused on information about that year's composers: Beethoven, Berlioz, Rossini, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Wagner, Bizet, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Strauss. Similarly, the art topic assigned was Romantic art in the European tradition. The Art Resource Guide included sections detailing the lives and works of relevant artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner, Claude Monet, Albert Bierstadt, and Camille Pissarro.

In the 1990s, various companies were established to research subjects and provide practice tests to teams. Two of the major ones were Acalon Cards and Exams and DemiDec, formed by former coach Dan Spetner and former Decathlete Daniel Berdichevsky, respectively. The two offer exams and study guides that can augment or replace USAD's official materials. USAD explicitly discouraged teams from ordering materials from third-party companies in the late 1998, though it later removed their discouragement from the curriculum page. USAD republished their discouragement just a few weeks after removing it, but did not publish such a warning in 2002.

In 2000, several coaches who had led their teams to Nationals during the 1990s resigned in protest over Academic Decathlon's decision to sell nearly $1,000 of study materials rather than simply providing topics for students to independently research. Teams felt obligated to buy the guides because USAD based the official tests on them. Teams also denounced the hundreds of errors they found in the official guides; coaches were sometimes forced to instruct their students to deliberately give the wrong answer in the official competition. Richard Golenko, coach of the 1996 J. Frank Dobie High School team that won the national competition, said that the decision to market guides shifted Academic Decathlon's emphasis to memorization over critical thinking. Coach Jim Hatem of Los Angeles and Coach Mark Johnson of El Camino's 1998 winning team fumed over esoteric "trick" questions that USAD had begun asking. James Alvino, USAD's executive director at that time, argued that the expensive study materials were necessary to continue funding nearly 75% of the program's $1,750,000 operating budget and to provide a fairer playing field for less wealthy schools, but did acknowledge that USAD would attempt to reduce prices, remove the more trivial questions, and base smaller portions of the tests on the official Resource Guide.

Basic Guides were formerly issued for students which, unlike the Resource Guides, remained the same from year to year. The Art Basic Guide focuses on art fundamentals, such as the elements of art, principles of composition, and different 2-D and 3-D techniques. Additionally, a brief introduction to art history is included. The Economics Basic Guide reviews fundamental economic concepts in addition to the basics of macroeconomics and microeconomics. The Language and Literature Basic Guide provides students with a basic grounding in the analysis of literature and introduces key terms such as synecdoche, metonymy, assonance, and aphorism. The Math Basic Guide offers a general overview of major topics in high school math, including algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and statistics. The Music Basic Guide begins by introducing the student to topics in music theory such as harmonics, rhythm, tempo, and the circle of fifths. It also includes information on a wide variety of instruments and a brief history of Western music. However, beginning in the 2010–2011 competition season, the Basic Guides were incorporated into the year's Resource Guides.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) has criticized the intense amount of studying required by students as "excess fact-mongering". In the 1980s, the Association did not endorse Academic Decathlon, citing what it believes was an excessive amount of time involved with the studying necessary to win. It stated that while it is not opposed to the academic portion of the competition, it disliked the "national dimension" of it. However, beginning in 2008, the Association placed USAD on their "National Advisory List of Student Contests and Activities". The list consists of programs that a NASSP committee believes meets their requisite quality standards.