As part of the massive influx of second-semester events, the UIL academic competitions are beginning to heat up and prepare for spring competitions.

“UIL academics is kind of the academic world’s version of football,” campus UIL director Jason Taylor said. “It’s where we apply everything you’ve learned in your high school career, and we try to have fun with it. We just have a little competition to see who the best science people are, who the best math people, the best social studies people, the best computer science people, language and literature and so on.”

The UIL academics competition is a way for students of different schools to compete in academic events. There are many types of events, and each one requires its own style of preparation.

“[I] Do practice tests,” freshman Marcus Mao said. “Go over how to do the problems, and in the case of events that involve a large amount of memorization, like science, just read stuff.”

The events and their variations in rules and scoring also require different preparation methods from the coaches.

“We practice every Monday afternoon,” math teacher Keith Christian said. “We have a schedule that we go by so that we know which event we’re going to be practicing on which day. For example, one Monday we may work on number sense skills, and then another Monday we work on calculator skills, what I have them do is they take practice exams, and then we have some time set aside so that if they have specific questions about the content of the questions we can address those, or if they need to talk about shortcuts for getting through some of the number sense problems, we have time to discuss that.”

Not only are the ways to practice different, but the reason and motivation for competing are different for each participant and coach as well.

“Well, I think that the idea of comparing yourself to other students and seeing where you stand among your peers is good,” Christian said. “It kind of gives you a way of doing some self-evaluation in terms of that particular concept or that particular event, in my case mathematics. I also think that sometimes, students have a passion about mathematics, and this is just a good outlet for it, it is something other than a class where they’re learning material and doing quizzes and tests; they’re doing it because they like it, not because it’s a requirement.”

Some students, meanwhile, take pleasure in the idea of having a good time and winning.

“[I do UIL for] Fun,” Mao said. “And I need the experience so I can actually win something in the later years.”

Others look at it for its competitive spirit.

“UIL is important because I think it matches,” debate teacher Tami Parker said. “It lets schools compete against each other, and always, whether it’s athletically, or through fine arts or though academics, I think UIL is important it compares apples to apples, so schools of the same size are competing against each other, and competition is one of those things that just encourages people to do better. At heart, we all want to be first, we all want to, even if you’re competing against yourself, you want to do better than you did last year, so UIL is just an organized way across the State of Texas that allows that competition to happen in a healthy way.”