Miscommunication causes It's Academic team to lose KMO standing

The Blair It's Academic team scored 1734 out of 2000 possible points in the Knowledge Master Open (KMO), held on Wednesday Dec. 6, but failed to report the score by 10 a.m. the following day. Had the score been reported by the deadline, the team would have placed first out of 20 teams in Maryland and third overall out of 783 teams in the world, which has significantly improved from Blair's ninth and eleventh place overall finishes in the past two KMOs.

The KMO is an international competition in which each participating team receives a CD of 200 multiple choice questions covering a broad range of academic subjects. On the competition day, Blair team members met during periods 5A, 5B and 6 in room 247 to complete the questions. After the team finished the questions, sponsor David Fantegrossi was unable to submit the scores due to a team miscommunication over who would give the results to him, according to It's Academic team captain senior David Gootenberg.

Despite the disappointment of not officially placing in the competition, the team is proud of their performance. "The mix-up hasn't really broken our stride," said Gootenberg. "Third place is back on par with how Blair traditionally does."

Blair KMO participants:

Seniors:
Lois Bangiolo
Jon Brookstone
Jessica Cutler
Zach Eaton
Colin Forhan
David Gootenberg
Tim He
Cyril Lan
Rachel Lee
George Moomau
Ishaan Mukherji
Mihir Narain
Henry Scher
Justin Vlasits
Max Wolf
Allen Zhang
Nancy Zheng

Juniors:
Cody Burton
Andrew Kung
Christopher Silberholz
Boris Vassilev
Julie Zhu

Sophomores:
Edward Gan
Sneha Kannan
Alisa Lu
Elizabeth So
Kevin Teng
Ethan Wang
Tai Zheng
Ya Zhou

Freshmen:
Diana Jing
Urja Mittal
Joel MuskinPierret