History of USAD/Survey/2009

During the 2009 National competition the USAD Board President and Administrative Consultant met with a number of students. The Board President meets with the students to get input from the student prospective on what is good about USAD and what needs improvement. The results were released on 9 October 2009:

1. Experience Awesome
2. Welcome Event-Great
3. Organization of all the events made Nationals less stressful.
4. Less stressful in testing this year due to more relaxed proctoring.
5. Testing went well.
6. Need more communication of schedule when arriving at registration.
7. Someone needs to go over schedule more…coach.
8. Need map of places when events are scheduled.
9. Liked the assistance of USAD staff.
10. Need more direction to speech and interview.
11. Best part of competition is meeting new people.
12. There is a great sense of importance of the competition at nationals.
13. USAD runs a very professional event.
14. Tests were well written.
15. Great sense of achievement at Nationals.
16. Like Academic Decathlon because of individual and team opportunities.
17. Maybe the best part is that a group of “Nerds” are powerful.
18. Get to learn from and teach others.
19. The depth of study in AD is greater than class work.
20. Liked the appeals table being visible.
21. Liked to have an event after competition.
22. Math test needs to be reduced to 25 questions with the possibility of 1 or 2 difficult problems.
23. Tests are miles ahead of other academic competitions.
24. Test questions that have specific data answers should be eliminated.
25. Speech timing needs to have an electronic timing option as compared to the card system.
26. Students could choose how they wanted to be timed.
27. Interview—Maybe one judge should focus on questions and the others on scoring to allow more time for the interview vs. the process.
28. Interviewers should not ask specific fact oriented curriculum questions.
29. Interview training might include mock interviews—electronic or face-to-face.
30. Interviewers should ask general questions related to the curriculum.
31. Nationals’ fundraising presents difficulties for many teams. One state pays airfare/room.
32. We need to work on the acceptance of Academic Competition concept.
33. One state has a meeting for fundraisers and they coordinate contributors to Nationals.
34. All aspects of curriculum need to be unified.
35. Future suggestions for curriculum were Ireland and India.
36. Appeared that music was written hastily and stretched to thin.
37. Language/Literature needs more theoretical unity.
38. Weighting of AP classes would make it very difficult for the program.
39. May need online survey for students.