Senior Quiz Bowl team smiles for a photo. Photo by Chloe Marshall '26.
Almost every seat in the dining hall was filled as students watched their peers compete in Quizbowl, the third event of MFS Spirit Week 2025. Seniors came in first place, winning the Jeopardy-style trivia game and earning their grade 100 points, putting them in second overall.
Freshmen are currently in first place, seniors are in second, juniors are in third, and sophomores are following close behind in fourth.
The six categories for Quiz Bowl this year were: Quakerism, Viral Velocity, Mind over Meme, World Cuisine Tour, Lights, Camera, Culture!, and The Arts. Both World Cuisine Tour and Quakerism returned from last year, with Quakerism being a staple category in every edition of Quiz Bowl.
Just before the event started, the staff members coordinating the event ran a buzzer check to ensure there was not a repeat of the technical issues with the buzzers that occurred last year. It took three attempts to make the buzzer make the proper noise, but thankfully there were no issues for the rest of the event.
The trivia began with the ninth graders answering a question from the Mind over Meme category for 300 points. The question asked for the correct year in which the Moorestown Friends Meeting House was built, and the freshman answered with “the Meeting House.” The sophomores, thinking that the error was the lack of the phrase “what is,” subsequently answered the question with, “What is the Meeting House?” failing to recognize the same mistake that the freshman made; the question asked for the correct year, not building.
The seniors took an early lead, answering five questions correctly before presenting a wrong answer.
Zaydan Lalani ’26 answered a significant number of the questions early on, leading to excitement from the seniors’ seating section. Whenever Lalani would get a question right, the entire senior area would erupt with chants of “Beads! Beads! Beads!”
Justin Lewis ’26 explained the chants, stating that “Zaydan was on a roll today, and he was wearing a beaded necklace for our theme day, so we thought we’d call him Beads. That just became the chant; it was pretty surface-level.”
By the final Jeopardy round, the seniors were in the lead with 1500 points, followed by the ninth graders with 500, the sophomores with 400, and the juniors with negative 100. As they accumulated negative points, the juniors were unable to participate in the final round, which would require them to wager points.
With the large gap in points, it was already guaranteed that the seniors would win before the final Jeopardy round even began, so they only wagered 67 points as a nod to the viral meme.
“We knew we already won, as long as we didn’t wager all our points and get it wrong, so we wagered 6-7 for the meme,” said senior Quiz Bowl contestant Allan Wang ’26.
The ninth graders decided to wager 200 of their points, and the sophomores decided to go all in, a decision that would end up causing them to earn 0 points and a third place finish.
The final Jeopardy question showed a picture of the Meeting House with a group of people congregating in front, and the teams were asked to guess which year the picture was taken. None of the grades got this question right, and some participants thought that the question was unfair.
“I thought it was a really stupid question,” Aryanna Dalal ’28 stated. Dalal elaborated, “The question should’ve been something that we were able to use our general knowledge to answer, not just randomly guess a date.”
Other students had complaints about other parts of the competition. Jason Lin ’27 felt that “some of the questions had the wrong point weights, and there were way too many pop culture questions.”
The seniors’ victory in this year’s Quiz Bowl is a huge victory for the grade, as they had yet to place first in an event this year.
“It felt super good. Obviously, we came in first, and it was good to see because our biggest contenders, the juniors, came in last,” said Lalani, who said he was thrilled about the win.