After a grueling two-week battle, four ASU colleges and schools are preparing for Thursday's final rounds of the third annual Academic Bowl.
A team from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will compete against the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, and the Herberger College of the Arts will battle the Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness for a chance to compete in the final round.
The semifinals start Thursday at 7 p.m., followed by the final round, and will be held at the studios of KAET, Channel 8, on the Tempe campus. The matchups will air on KAET in November.
The Academic Bowl kicked off Oct. 14-15 with 15 teams of undergraduate students representing colleges across all four ASU campuses. The opening round eliminated seven teams, leaving just eight teams to compete in the quarterfinals. The four winning teams from the quarterfinals advanced to Thursday's semifinals.
The competition is a question-and-answer format using electronic scoring systems and a lockout system, which uses a buzzer to indicate which team answered first. The subjects of the questions range from science, literature, sports, pop culture and music.
Virgil Renzulli, director of the Academic Bowl and ASU's vice president of Public Affairs, said he believes it's important to highlight students' academic achievements.
“We thought that the Academic Bowl is very important because ASU is an institution that has been changing quite a bit,” Renzulli said. “We wanted to focus more attention on the academic achievements of our students and not just the great athletes and intellectuals that we have here.”
Renzulli said that most schools have a hard time putting together one team and the fact that ASU has 15 teams is amazing.
“The questions are extremely hard, and the teams have been doing very well,” he said. “One of our teams from last year's Academic Bowl placed nationally.”
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences won the 2007 Academic Bowl, and the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering was the first Academic Bowl champion in 2006.
Each member of the winning four-person team will receive $4,500 in scholarship money, and the team will display the President's Trophy in their college. Up to four people on the winning college or school's alternate team will receive $1,000 in scholarship money as well.
Special education and Spanish freshman Allison Walsh, a member of the Mary Lou Fulton School of Education team, said she prepared for the Academic Bowl by practicing the format of the competition.
“It is hard to really prepare for the questions that will be asked because they are random, but I practiced [by] answering questions in 12-minute rounds with my team,” Walsh said.
Reach the reporter at allison.carlin@asu.edu.
