Quest Academy's middle school athletic teams include boys' and girls' cross country, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and track. [4]
The student council program is called the Knight Program. To become a knight, students must be courteous and follow twelve specified character traits while also doing a "knight" project. School-wide "pageant" assemblies are held where new knights and "squires" are recognized. To be a knight or squire, you must demonstrate the character traits. All students start as "pages."
Quest Academy uses the RCA House System. They use the houses of Rêveur, Onraka, Nukumori, Sollevare, and Isibindi. The school knights lead the houses.
Quest Academy has a choir program for middle school, and lower school students can join the Harmonizers. Drama is a required class at Quest for all grades. Every grade performs in a play or musical. Past musicals include "Beauty and the Beast", "Peter Pan" and "Mary Poppins". Students especially talented in Drama can perform at school-wide pageants and assemblies.
Quest also competes in several math competitions, including The Latin School of Chicago, AMC 8, the Noetic Math Competition, and Mathcounts.
Quest also has Scholastic Bowl and Policy Debate teams. Their Scholastic Bowl team has qualified for the NAQT Middle School National Championship Tornament 9 times [5] . They have also won Illinois state championships 6 times in IESA format [6] , more than any other middle school. [7]
A Quest student won 2nd place nationally at National History Day in June 2025 in the Junior Individual Website category [8] . Quest also partcipates in the Illinois Student Invention Convention.
Quest Academy gifted curriculum covers mathematics, Language Arts, Social Studies (Language Arts and Social Studies are combined in middle school), art, drama, science, music, Spanish, technology, and library. They use unusual teaching techniques, including skill-based math classes, historical simulations, and dialogue-based Spanish. Elective trimester-long classes, known as flexes, are also offered to middle school students several days a week, helping them engage in the arts, sciences, sports, or other activities.
Universities or colleges currently or previously enrolling former Quest students include: Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, MIT, Tufts University, Brown University, Duke University, University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Cornell University, University of Illinois, Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Grinnell College, Boston College, Washington University, Purdue University, USC and Dartmouth College. [9]
