Culver Academies wins Indiana Ethics Bowl title

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Feb. 13, 2023

A team of five students from Culver Academies won the Indiana Ethics Bowl championship.

Rebecca Ciarochi ’23 of Dallas, Natalia Somma Tang ’24 of San Francisco, Linda (Qiyan) Su ’24 of Xiemen City, China, Chloe Raymundo ’25 of Salt Lake City, and Jason (Junxin) Tang ’25 of Shanghai, China, became the first Culver Academies squad to win a state Ethics Bowl championship.

“We never really thought that winning was a possibility,” said Natalia Somma Tang, one of the team captains. “We just went in with the mindset of we're going to do our best. We were there for ethics learning.”

The Culver team beat the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities, a boarding school in Muncie, in the championship round. The Culver team had lost to Indiana Academy in the round-robin section of the competition, their only loss of the day.

Ciarochi said despite the earlier loss, the Culver team was confident.

“We knew we could win,” she said.

Sixteen teams took part in the competition held Feb. 4 at DePauw University’s Prindle Institute for Ethics, including another five-student team from Culver. That team comprised Tina (Yili) Wen ’23 of Chendu, China, Sebastian Sanchez ’24 of Inglewood, California, Ashley (Yuqi) Zheng ’24 of Hefei, China, Carridee Raymundo ’25 of Salt Lake City, and Tony (Zitong) Zhou ’25 of Beijing, China. 

That team, known as Culver 1, lost to Herron High School in Indianapolis in the quarterfinals. That matched the best previous finish by Culver, which first fielded a team in 2018. The first national Ethics Bowl was held in 2012.

The Culver 2 team that won the state championship was seeded eighth among the eight teams heading into the quarterfinals, while Culver 1 was seeded seventh.

The teams are coached by Evan Dutmer, Ph.D., a senior instructor in ethics and Don Fox ’75, a senior instructor and Richard W. Freeman Chair of Leadership. Dutmer said the Culver 2 squad improved every round.

“Every single round they were learning. They were so curious. They showed so much perspective and judgment,” Dutmer said.

 

Teams are given 15 cases, drawn from current events and real-life situations, to prepare for. The cases included whether a man married to a woman for 60 years who comes down with Alzheimer's can have a relationship with another woman. Another asks whether people should consider the feelings of artificial intelligence. Another asks whether people should be able to say they don’t want solar panels in their neighborhoods even though it would benefit society by providing power for thousands. Each case has two or three questions.

In each round, a case is randomly selected and a question from that case is randomly selected. Teams are given three minutes to prepare, but aren’t allowed to take notes.

The first team makes a six-minute presentation. The opposing team then is given three minutes to respond. The first team then gets an additional three minutes. Judges then have 10 minutes to ask questions.

In the second round, a new case is randomly selected and the same two teams compete again, but this time the second team goes first.

Teams are evaluated on the following criteria: clear and systematic presentation, thorough discussion of the moral dimensions of the case, thoughtful consideration of different/opposing viewpoints, response to opposing team’s case and commentary, and response to judges’ questions.

Culver students say what they like best about the Ethics Bowl is that teams don’t argue against each other. The competition is designed to get students talking and working together.

“I'm really averse to competition in general because I get quite anxious around it,” Tang said. “I think that the Ethics Bowl is an environment where a lot of that pressure is taken away. Because there is less focus on winning and competition and more of a lens of collaboration.”

Ciarochi said it’s starkly different from a debate, where teams focus on countering an opponent’s argument.

“The Ethics Bowl teaches you to think , ‘If people say XYZ, you think XYZ and …, or XYZ but …’ So it teaches you to think larger and think more outside the box and think of more potential outcomes, more possibilities, more variables factors that also may be affecting it in a way that the other team might not have considered,” she said. “It's being able to being able to see and understand all the complexities and any moral dilemma.”

Teams frequently complement opponents and build on the opposing team’s arguments.

“You're looking for another perspective or another stance that you can identify in this situation that outweighs maybe what they're saying or takes relevance over it,” Ciarochi said.

Teams that don’t acknowledge good points put forward by opposing teams are penalized.

“I think that's what Ethic Bowl is trying to promote the idea that you should be listening to other people and listening to their ideas,” Tang said.

Dutmer said if fits well with the Harkness method of teaching the Humanities Department at Culver Academies frequently uses, which challenges students to make meaning of new information by talking, listening and thinking while a teacher moderates a discussion led by students.

Culver took a different approach to the competition than many of the other teams, which had each team member specialize on certain questions. That meant that person answered only when their topic came up. For Culver, all five team members contributed to most discussions in a conversational style.

“We prefer to work as a team rather than as individuals,” Tang said. “That goes back to this point of building off of each other's ideas and building complexity and being a really cooperative team.”

Dutmer said the team approach was key.

“I think that made us stand apart,” Dutmer said. “I think it was powerful to see five young people be able to field the questions, to keep developing their ideas and share the thinking.”

Ciarochi said collaborating with her teammates was what she enjoyed most.

“That was the best part, being able to work together toward a common goal,” she said.

Tang said she believes the diversity of Culver’s team was an advantage.

 “We think the diversity of our team is integral to being able to make sound arguments and look at things from different perspectives,” she said.

Each student at Culver also is required to take an ethics class.

The Culver teams began meeting an hour a week on Monday evenings at the start of the school year. They began meeting twice a week after winter break to get ready for the state tournament.

“Most people took it upon themselves to also do extra work and extra research for the cases and then we present it to each other like during our meetings,” Ciarochi said.

The Culver team had a shot at advancing to the National High School Ethics Bowl Competition, hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill March 31-April 2, but were defeated on Tuesday, Feb. 14, by Hickman High School of Columbia, Missouri in the divisonal round.