Quest for the Quill

Any student enrolled in a language arts class automatically participates in the competition. However, students enrolled in a course other than language arts are allowed to solve the puzzles for a prize.

Quest for the Quill starts at the beginning of the academic year and ends after the third quarter.

Students participate in Quest for the Quill by submitting their writing projects at the end of each quarter. Once all of the LA instructors at a campus have submitted the scores for the writing projects, the campus will automatically know who the Quarter or Quest Champions are.

A Quarter Champion is a student who has the top writing project score in their course across all sections of the same course at their campus. At a minimum, there is 1 Quarter Champion per course per unit (it’s possible there are ties, so there may be more than 1 Quarter Champion per course).

A Quest Champion is a student who has the highest average writing project score in their course across the first three units. This is the highest distinction that a student can attain in the competition as there are only 7 Quest Champions on a campus per year (one for each LA course).

LA instructors score writing projects at the end of each quarter using an extensive online grading rubric that enables them to calculate their students’ scores reliably and granularly.

If a student is a Quarter or Quest Champion, their instructor will reward them with a medal during class.

Quarter and Quest Champions are posted on the physical leaderboard next to the Quest for the Quill map on campus; a digital leaderboard is also available on this page (see above).

The map displayed at the Academy for students and visitors to enjoy tracks the campuses’s progress as they race each other to the Golden Quill. Each campus is represented by a magnet, and these campus pieces move throughout the academic year as scores are submitted. The better a campus does on their writing projects relative to other campuses, the further on the map they’ll go. The campus that’s furthest on the map by the end of the year wins the Golden Quill Trophy.

Campus pieces progress through different “dimensions” on the map (each dimension represents a setting used in one of the LA courses). Once a campus piece enters a new dimension, it unlocks a new message from the Guild of Enchanted Cartographers, the organization behind the creation of the map and the competition. The messages come in the form of linguistic puzzles that test students’ language arts acumen, and they can be retrieved from the “top secret folder” next to the map.

Students are encouraged to bring their completed puzzles to the campus and show someone at the front desk. A front desk staff member will check students’ answers, and if correct, they will receive an exciting reward. There is one puzzle per dimension, and so the further a campus goes on the map, the more opportunities students get to solve puzzles and collect the small prizes that come with completed puzzles.