“The college prep team placed third and the advanced placement team placed sixth, so overall we did pretty good,” economics teacher and coach Mark DeCourcy said.

On March 21, the econ team traveled to the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank to compete against nearly 25 other schools in the 2016 econ challenge. This competition gives students the opportunity to compete against other schools and test their knowledge of economics.

“I joined econ team because I enjoy the AP macro class, have a decent knowledge in the material and wanted to see how well we could do in a competition based on it,” senior Evan Johnson said.

Johnson along with seniors Dhruva Jandhyala, Will Sanders and Ricky Macke competed on the AP team while junior Justin Allen and seniors Victoria Alvarez, Alyssa Boeur and Logan Smith competed on the CP team.

“There were three multiple choice tests over microeconomics, macroeconomics and international economics,” Macke said. “Then the top two teams based on the test move onto a quiz-bowl style competition to decide the winner.”

Each team takes a test, and whichever schools score the highest win the challenge and move onto other competitions.

“My favorite part of the challenge was getting to work with my team on some of the topics,” Alvarez said. “There are some sections where they worked individually and some where we worked together, so it was nice to sit with my team and try to figure out answers.”

The team practiced during lunch or in the mornings to prepare for the challenge. “They can ask me questions on topics they don’t know and we can review topics that could possibly be on the test. It’s basically just study sessions on different things and we just bounce things off everybody,” DeCourcy said.

Although the teams did well in the challenge, there was room for improvement in each area.

“The CP team missed going to the quiz bowl round by one question,” DeCourcy said. “We were really close on that. But on their AP test, which were difficult, we probably needed to do a little more studying.”