THE VP DECA SWEEP: Part 1

DECA is split into 5 main clusters: principles, marketing, entrepreneurship, finance, and business management. There are 2 different types of events: writtens and teams. This year at Ontario DECA, every participant was expected to write an exam. 

The precursor to official regionals started on November 5, 2024. VP DECA did their exams in the library, including individuals, writtens, and teams competitors. We interviewed Zayaan Bhanwadia, Integrated Marketing Service Campaign (IMCS) competitor and the writtens trainer at VP DECA. 

You may be wondering, what exactly do writtens competitors do? Zayaan says that they “create a written report or come up with ideas for consulting businesses on various matters.” He highlights that “in writtens you have preparation time and are working until the competition day to prepare a presentation instead of being given a case study to do on the day of the competition.” 

Zayaan also gave a few tips on how to ace a DECA exam: “I would recommend doing previous year's exams and either making notes or going over a quizlet with key terms and other important information for your cluster exam.” 

When asked how he thinks he did, Zayaan said that “my partners and I did great. Hopefully, we qualified. The exam was fairly easy and we all studied a lot so hopefully, it paid off.” Panther Press congratulates the team on making it Provincials, and wishes the best of luck to all teams competitors! 

Aside from writtens competitors, we also had teams writing the exams. Teams competitor Nathan Ye said that the exam was “decently well organized”; he also notes that “I had a French oral next period so I had to do the exam fast and I almost got 0 on French oral because I took too long to do the exam, I had like 20 min. It’s ok I still did bad on french oral anyway”. 

Overall, the exam process for VP DECA regionals went quite smoothly, and all competitors did phenomenal. Congratulations to everyone who competed, and good luck at in-person Regionals!