Oak Hill Academy Math Counts team Sets Record and Moves on to States!!

Mrs. Rita Cotterell, an upper school math teacher at Oak Hill Academy, took a group of 6 seventh and eighth grade students to Union County College for the Math Counts competition for Middlesex, Union and Monmouth Counties on Saturday, February 7, 2015.

The MATHCOUNTS Competition Program is a national middle school coaching and competitive mathematics program that promotes mathematics achievement through a series of fun and engaging “bee” style contests. The program exists in all 50 states plus U.S. territories and the Department of Defense and State Department schools. ( more information at www.mathcounts.org )

The team from Oak Hill competed against public, private and parochial schools from those three counties in a multi-round competition. The competition begins with a 30 question test covering every strand of mathematics in word problem format. The students then move on to the target round where they are given 2 high level word problems that need to be completed in 6 minutes. This is repeated 4 times for a total of 8 questions. Subsequently, the top team from each school takes a test of 10 questions requiring teamwork and leadership. We finished 1st out of all of the independent and parochial schools and a record of 2nd place overall! This is the highest place that we have ever finished and sets a new mark for any private school. The team moves on to the State Competition on Saturday, March 14 at Rutgers University.

The team was made up of Thomas Wang, Michael Zhang, Anna Effenberger, Dylan Servilla, Lucas Bruckmann and William Walsh. They meet biweekly on Friday afternoons. Congratulations to Mrs. Cotterell and her team for such an outstanding accomplishment!