After winning first place at state, the Illinois Personal Finance Challenge team is heading off to nationals Friday in Kansas City.

Seniors Jenna Palka and Ross Behr, and juniors Jeremy Belington and Mike Sawicki took first at state and will be heading to nationals as a team.

“We are excited to compete at nationals. The last round of the competition was competitive and we hope to do the best at nationals,” Palka said.

Also competing as a team were seniors Patrick McCormack, Elijah Pinkevich, Christian O’Neil, and junior Emily Pietura. Their team took fifth place but will not be competing at nationals.

“It went really well at state. We are in region two which is the hardest. We won that and the second team of ours had one of the top five scorers in the state so we were one of the only schools to have two teams that were in the top 10,” economics teacher Candace Fikis said.

For the first round, the teams had to complete two individual tests.

“The tests in the first round are all online and are multiple choice tests. But, it is graded in a way where if you get something right you get 10 points or if you get something wrong it is minus 10 points,” Fikis said.

The team had take a test on personal finance.

“They also introduced a case study (in the third round) where students are given a problem and they have to solve it financially and present it to somebody in the financial field. They did not count that score but they will at nationals so that was kind of a practice run,” Fikis said.

After those rounds, the top teams went head-to-head in a quiz bowl .

“We went up against Lasalle-Peru High School,” Fikis said. “It is a quiz-bowl with 25 questions and that one is very competitive. Nobody had more than a one-point lead and it came to the last question they buzzed in. They missed the question so that helped us,” Fikis said.