<p>I don't know how rare this is, but......</p>
<p>St</a>. John's High School and Academy News - St. John's Jesuit High School & Academy</p>
<p>My guess is that he is going to whichever of those choices he wants to attend… 
Good for him.</p>
<p>SAT writing essay is graded on a 12 point scale. So did he get a 10 or a perfect score?</p>
<p>The article said 10/10. Do you mean he could have done better? Earlier it was mentioned that he got an 800 on all three sections.</p>
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<p>Kid in my D’s H.S. class got this. All first and only attempt. Also got a bunch of 800’s on SAT-2’s, and 5’s on APs.
Didn’t get into his two top choices- MIT and Yale.
Settled for Harvard.</p>
<p>The kid in the linked article does seem very well-rounded so my guess is he will do really well.</p>
<p>You can get an 800 in writing without a 12 on the essay. </p>
<p>But the article is in error saying “10/10.” I assume they meant “12/12.”</p>
<p>I have twin nephews. Both twins scored perfect 36s on their ACTs and one twin also scored a perfect 2400 on his SAT. I don’t know how they did on their PSATs. Both are juniors at small LACs (not Ivies). We wondered if they would go to the same or different schools; they chose separate schools that are close to each other.</p>
<p>It was really rare in the past, because it was relatively rare for anyone to take both tests. Essentially there’s no reason to take both, especially if you already have the highest score possible on one. I don’t know of any college that won’t accept whichever one of them a student chooses. But increasingly kids seem to take both tests as a matter of course, so it’s probably going to be more common. It seems like about 350 kids/year get the top SAT score on a single test, and somewhat more the top ACT score. I would think at least 25-50% of the SAT group, and maybe a little less of the ACT group, ought to have a legitimate shot at the top score on the other test.</p>
<p>Now, I still don’t know why anyone with the top score on one test would waste a morning taking the other test, unless maybe they had taken the ACT first, and needed the SAT to get named a NMF based on their PSAT. Or really wanted a shot at being a Presidential Scholar.</p>
<p>JHS, maybe it’s just a simple matter of having signed up and paid for both tests at the same time. I did that for both of my girls, assuming that they would do better on one than the other. D1 needed both because she did much better on the second test (ACT), but D2 did better on the SAT, which was taken first.</p>
<p>Silverturtle and LoremIpsums kid both got perfect scores pn both ACT and SAT. A couple other kids on here I can’t remember. PSAT IDK.</p>
<p>You can get named a presidential scholar for a 36 on the ACT - a kid in my daughter’s school did last year (did not have a perfect SAT).</p>
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<p>My son took the ACT his sophomore year and got a 36; he figured he was done with these tests. Yet his school required him to take the PSAT the following October; he forgot about it and showed up without prepping or a calculator and still got the 240. Later he was told that he had to re-take the ACT as a junior to be allowed to graduate (state law), so he re-took the ACT and got another 36, again without prepping or a calculator. He did not bother to take the SAT.</p>
<p>If one takes the SAT first in an ACT-required state, it’s quite possible to end up with two perfect scores. Silverturtle got them and there have been others on CC. I would think that the vast majority of those who got a perfect score in one test could get to do so again on the other; it’s mostly a matter of being forced into a situation of needing to take both tests, either for graduation requirements or to maximize potential merit scholarships.</p>
<p>Appears I messed up my earlier post about LIs kid, I knew it was a couple perfect exams.</p>
<p>I seem to recall an old thread in which someone computed the probability of maxing both the SAT and ACT (but I’m too tired to look for it now).</p>
<p>A few years ago a local kid with a long list of EC’s scored a perfect ACT and SAT and got rejected from every school in the above article except Yale, which waitlisted him. He didn’t even get into the University of Texas’s Plan II honors program, but was accepted for general admission at UT. He ended up going to Rice.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thecollegemoneyguys.com/49/#[/url]”>http://www.thecollegemoneyguys.com/49/#</a></p>
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<p>For those who ace one test and actually bother to take both, I’d say the odds are fairly high – maybe even better than 50-50. Consider:</p>
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<li><p>On a question-by-question basis, the material covered is not particularly difficult for high schoolers with decent teachers</p></li>
<li><p>The “perfect scores” we talk about are not necessarily perfect: one can miss 3 (maybe even 4 on a hard curve) questions in the right places and still get the max score. That allows some tolerance for minor oversights.</p></li>
<li><p>For the ACT, you can usually get -1 in reading and still get a 36 sub-score; in two others, a -1 would usually get you a 35 sub-score, but 35.5 and above are rounded to 36</p></li>
<li><p>For the SAT, in reading you can usually have -2 and still get an 800 sub-score; in writing you can either get a 10 on the essay with perfect multiple choice or a 12 on the essay with -2 on the multiple choice</p></li>
<li><p>While the tests are slightly different, there are predictable tricks and traps, and the very best test-takers have developed their own ways of making good use of them</p></li>
<li><p>Many students who report a perfect score also note they had sufficient time left over to check much of their work and catch sloppy mistakes – or were able to devote 5 minutes or more to a particularly vexing problem</p></li>
<li><p>Many students panic and play watch-the-clock. Top test-takers have the self-confidence to not panic or doubt themselves, which reduces wasted time and allows emotional detachment</p></li>
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<p>Really, the hardest thing about these tests are that they require one to have a broad knowledge of vocabulary, grammar rules, and math skills immediately at the ready. In my readings and my observations with my two sons (my older one “only” got a 35 on his ACT but he took the test as a high school junior at age 13), right-brain learners have a significant advantage here.</p>
<p>Left-brain learners, the vast majority (70%+), learn by drill and repetition. Information gets stored in short-term memory and only slowly moves into long-term memory. Also stored information is generally accessed sequentially – i.e., by one path only. This learning style can become a drawback when trying to immediately retrieve lots of information taught over long periods of time.</p>
<p>Right-brain learners need to first see the big picture framework, but are able to store what they learn immediately into long-term memory. Based on my direct observations, this information is not memorized, it’s somehow disassembled and stored as cross-relationships. Done at the extreme, the process can look like magic: I watched my younger son teach himself a semester’s worth of college material – AP Physics C Mechanics – in 3 afternoons, two quickly scanning the material and one taking old AP tests to find his weak areas. Yes, he used his knowledge of Physics B and his self-taught calculus as a baseline. But he never wrote down a new formula or saved it for reference or review, he simply stared at it for a minute or two and moved on. He did not do any practice problems until he finished the entire semester’s worth of material; and when he finished, he moved on to his next subject, 4 of them self-taught in 4 weeks in his spare time while juggling 9 other classes. Three weeks later, he took the test without time for review and got the 5.</p>
<p>So extreme right-brain learners not only have a wide range of facts stored directly into long-term memory, they can access this material in a non-sequential fashion by backing into it from many different directions. That redundancy allows them to more quickly retrieve knowledge or, in math especially, to create their own unique solutions given their understanding of general mathematical principals and the data immediately available.</p>
<p>If you happen to learn like this, repeating your success on basic-knowledge tests like the SAT and ACT, is not unlikely, even without bothering to review the material. It should be noted that there is no “free lunch” in life: such learners have a miserable time trying to answer vague or general questions – the sheer number of possible answers can overwhelm them.</p>
<p>For more on left-brain vs right-brain learners, google Linda K. Silverman and visual-spatial learners.</p>
<p>I say it always makes sense to take SAT and ACT. Who knows… there may be a scholarship pegged more toward one than the other. Many of the kids with top scores don’t study - it is simply one morning of effort for them.</p>
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<p>Don’t hold your breath. My son’s perfect ACT/PSAT/SAT II scores and 1/400 class rank didn’t get him accepted at MIT or Yale.</p>
<p>I hope Sean Wheelock looks beyond just applying to MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford. These schools routinely reject the majority of perfect scorers and, based on the article, his leadership roles in ECs and community service are pretty weak, relative to national competition. SG President and otherwise nothing; no regional or national awards.</p>
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<p>Happens all the time. Well-advised students will ladder their choices with acceptance rates up into the 30% range and end up somewhere they can happily call home. The ones who get too cocky often find themselves at the undesired safety they never expected to attend. The competition is truly brutal out there these days!</p>
<p>“As a comparative, the average scores for the Class of 2011 were 497 in Reading, 514 in Math, and 489 in writing.”</p>
<p>Meh.</p>
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I’m not going to feel sorry for someone who got into Cal Tech. I agree there needs to at least one more less competitive school added to the list from the OP.</p>