800. A nice round number. Perfect, even. That is if it’s your Math SAT score.
And for three seniors at Woodland High School – Evan Ailinger, Michael Gabalis, and Orion Hollar – that’s what they got. The students recently received their results from their Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) and were excited to discover they each earned a perfect score – 800 – on the math section of the test.
The College Board doesn’t release the exact number of students who receive 800 in each section of the SATs each year, however the organization does say that the number who receive a perfect score in any section is less than 1%. Using 1% as a baseline, the possibility of three students taking the SAT at the same high school receiving perfect math scores is less than 0.0001%.
In other words, the chance of three Woodland High School students receiving perfect math scores the same year is quite literally less than one-in-a-million.
“Having a single student receive a perfect score on a section of the SAT is rare – less than 1 in 100,” said Woodland High School Principal John Shoup. “Having three students do it in a single school year is almost unheard of and the staff is incredibly proud of the students’ accomplishment and the hard work they put in to make it happen.”
Many students planning to attend college take an assessment test called the Scholastic Assessment Test (or SAT), an admission requirement for many colleges and universities. The College Board, the organization which oversees the SAT as well as Advanced Placement (AP) class requirements, designed the SAT to measure students’ knowledge in a variety of content areas including language arts, analytical skill, and mathematics.
I’d say these students measured out alright.
Evan Ailinger attributes his success on the SATs to his passion for math, “I love the feeling I get when I get the right answer for a math problem.”
In a similar way, Orion Hollar likes the definitive nature of solutions to math problems, “When you get the right answer, you know you’ve gotten the right answer.”
Michael Gabalis sticks by the rule that your first answer is likely your best answer. “Definitely trust your first instinct with an answer,” he said. “The College Board has statistics that show students who change their answer more likely change a right answer to a wrong one rather than the other way around.”
Congratulations to these students, we expect they’ll make it big sum… er, someday. :)
