On Nov 8th 2013, a surprise letter from College Board arrived in my mail box. I opened it and began reading. It read,
"Dear Aadith,
... You not only received the top score of 5, but in doing so, you were one of 11 students in the world to earn every possible point on the AP Calculus BC exam answering every multiple-choice question correctly and earning maximum scores on each open-ended responses in the free response section of the exam, among the 104,612 students across 59 countries who took the AP Calculus BC exams in 2013...
sd. Trevor Packer
Sr. VP AP&Instruction
The College Board
"
I was blown away. I never knew that it was possible to know the actual points earned leave alone the possibility of earning every point in an AP exam!
After a grueling season of Academic Challenges as a member of the PHUHS
School Academic team, I was selected for the County Academic All Star
team.
The Pinellas County team participated in the State
Commissioner’s Academic Challenge in Orlando April 18- 20th and won the
State Division I Championship!
On the morning of March 28th 2013,
I turned on my computer along with my parents to see the scores for the SAT Tests that I took on March 9th 2013 . It so
happened that the College Board website was not functioning properly; I found
it impossible to log into my account. While getting tense every minute, I kept
trying to log in every 5 minutes. Finally my parents and I resigned ourselves
to the reality that I would not be able to view my score that day. After about
two hours, while surfing the Internet, I found a link to an alternate page to
view my score. By then, the anxiety was killing not only me but also my
parents. My father even chose to skip work. Finally, the alternate link worked
and I reached the page where my score was to be found. It said 800-800-800. My
parents and I could not believe our eyes. Was it real? Or were we just dreaming?
We refreshed the page multiple times to make sure. When I found out that I had
received a perfect score on the SAT, my countenance was truly ineffable! I
could not believe it! My parents were extremely thrilled and proud of me and I
felt a great relief within me. We
were hugging each other and yelling with tears of joy flowing down our cheeks.
This was a culmination of a
year long preparation. The secret to this success is dedication and hard work.
Students who wish to get a perfect score must follow a regimen for at least six
months, wherein the student dedicates at least an hour a day and four to five
hours a weekend. It is imperative to do as many practice tests as possible. At
least for me, my scores seemed to be exactly correlated to the number of
practice tests I had taken, which finally tallied to about 25. Another useful
advice is to study as many vocabulary words as possible: my critical reading
scores correlated with the number of words I had studied before each practice
test. From a large variety of sources, I may have added nearly 5000 new words to
my vocabulary since the start of my SAT preparation. Math is another area where
you should not make a single mistake. In summary, ‘Perfect practice makes perfect’.
