The Cerritos Spring Festival Falcon Games officially began on Tuesday, March 24 with the third Academic Decathlon, which took place in LC 155 at 6 p.m.
21 clubs participated in the competition this year and while the questions were designed to be more difficult than the previous years, students proved their academic knowledge with the games’ first ever three-way tie for second place.
The Queer Straight Alliance club came in first place and was awarded the $300 prize, while the STEM, Wilderness and Anthropology clubs all tied for second place. Model United Nation club won the ‘wildcard’ category with a prize of $50.
While Decathlon moderator and ICC commissioner Suleyma Castillo was prepared to break up the tie and declare one second-place winner, the clubs decided among themselves to instead share the prize money. Each club was awarded $100.
“It goes to show the sportsmanship among the clubs,” Castillo said.
She said, “That they’d rather choose to split it $100 each instead of one club winning $200 and one being left out. So that kind of shows a lot about the students on campus and how they work together.”
Questions, picked by both the Chair of the Decathlon Joseph Frausto and Cerritos professors, were considered by Frausto to be harder than they had been in previous years.
“I definitely wanted to separate those that excel when they study, or are naturally smart. So when I would do the questions I tried to make one easy, one maybe a little more advanced, or two easy and then that one extra advanced question.”
Certainly some were easy, with one being ‘How many Oscars has Leonardo Dicaprio won?’, while other questions like ‘Diamonds are an example of what kind of network solid?’ stumped all participants.
One such question, ‘What critical party was Mussolini part of?’, caused a small stir during the game.
Michael Melindo, nursing major wrote ‘Blacks’ as his answer, which to some came across as a rude joke or vague guess.
Ariel Hughes, a member of the Falcon Games committee, spoke up to Castillo about the answer.
Castillo immediately announced to the room that such answers were not appropriate or allowed during the games.
Melindo explained that his answer had been misunderstood.
His answer was legitimate in that there was a real party affiliated with Mussolini in Italy with the word ‘Blacks’ in it.
Suleyma Castillo questioned Melindo regarding his answer.
He said, “Look here’s my phone, this is a real party and no offense was intended,”
Castillo issued an apology for the misunderstanding.
Hughes said of the event, “I’ve never let anything get to me, but there’s a way to word things, if you’re going to do that, just saying ‘Blacks’, you need to put the whole name of what you’re talking about, that way it’s not misconstrued. You have 25 seconds to put the whole name on there not everybody else is thinking the same thing you are, and I wasn’t thinking the same thing that he was, and I feel like it was a little on the racial slur sort of thing.”
Hughes chose to excuse herself from the rest of the games. “It’s freedom of speech and people can speak as they want to,” she finished, “and I’m all for everyone’s freedom, so that’s okay. But I don’t want to be a part of that freedom of speech.”
The rules of the game remained the same as before, with different categories that clubs were notified of ahead of time so they could choose which members would tackle which categories.
One difference this year was seen in the final round.
Frausto explained, “For the final round we let them work as a team rather than just having them go one by one, we let the team as a club communicate with each other and all decided on what they wanted to put as an answer.”
All in all, the club members remained excited and enthusiastic from start to finish and ended the Decathlon in good spirits.
“It’s special to our college,” Castillo said of the Decathlon, “because no other college has this, and it was made by the students.”
