Posted on: Thursday, April 14, 2005

107 find perfection in SAT's new exam

By Justin Pope
The Associated Press

Austin Weiss is a pioneer in perfection, a charter member of an elite new club: students who scored a flawless 2400 on the new SAT.

When the college entrance exam expanded from two sections to three this year, the mark required for perfection rose from 1600 to 2400. This week, as the 300,000 students who took the first sitting of the new test March 12 began receiving scores, the College Board reported that 107 scored a perfect 800 on each of the three sections — writing, critical reading and math.

Weiss, a 16-year-old junior at Palm Desert High School in California, learned he was one of those students after stumbling out of bed Monday morning. His mother had already retrieved his score online and posted it on the bathroom mirror.

"I put in my left contact lens and blinked a couple times and saw a little Post-it note, and it said just one thing: 2400," Weiss said Tuesday.

"I just leaned my head out and screamed at the top of my lungs and said, 'Are you serious?' " She was.

The College Board, which owns the SAT, confirmed the number of perfect scores but has not yet publicly released detailed information about how all the test-takers did. Educators are curious whether student performance on the new test will, as the College Board has pledged, be comparable to the old.

College Board spokeswoman Caren Scoropanos said "there is no factual information to endorse that claim." The overall distribution of scores for this year's high school juniors will not be released until August 2006, but she said "there is a broad distribution of scores on all three sections."

Of the 1.4 million 2004 high school graduates who took the old SAT, 939 scored a then-perfect 1600, according to Brian O'Reilly, the College Board's executive director of SAT information services.

The percentage of test-takers who hit triple-perfection on the new test in March is about half that, though O'Reilly said comparisons are difficult because the group that took the new test on its first offering may not be typical.

Weiss prepared by taking a full-length practice test the weekend before the test but did not take any kind of prep class — a regimen in keeping with the College Board's recommendations. He had come within 40 points of a perfect score on the PSAT, so his SAT mark wasn't a huge surprise.