" PERFECT SCORE - Amitha Harichandran, a junior at Quartz Hill High School, scored 1,600 on the SAT. She plans to follow in her father's footsteps and major in management and finance at Harvard. "ROB LAYMAN/Valley Press
Posted on 05/14/2003 8:52:52 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Her father challenged her to make a "perfect" score on the SAT.
And this spring Amitha Harichandran, a Quartz Hill High School junior, met his challenge, bringing home a 1,600, the highest possible score on the SAT I: Reasoning Test.
The junior scored 800 on the math and verbal portions of the test.
Amitha said the score came after she took classes and practice tests for the aptitude and skills exam used for college entrance.
"She's been a pretty good student throughout. She met my challenge," said Wijey Harichandran, her father. "She threw the challenge back at me."
The 16-year-old became part of a select group of students who achieved the highest score. Last year, only 616 students out of 1.3 million high school students, or one student in 2,156, scored a 1,600 on the test nationwide, according to The College Board, the creators of the SAT.
Amitha's score is rare for Quartz Hill High as well. Vice Principal Karen Parker said several students have scored 800 on the verbal or math portion, but she can't recall a student achieving the highest score on both sections in her seven years at the high school.
"It is extremely rare," Parker said. "It's an honor."
But Amitha is a goal-driven achiever, Parker said.
"She's a hard worker and does a lot of volunteer work. She is a busy person and very focused."
The junior tackled the SAT the same way she does her International Baccalaureate classes at Quartz Hill High; she didn't procrastinate and prepared for the test.
She first took the SAT exam her sophomore year in school. She scored 1,410, far above the 1,049 average score for Quartz Hill, as reported by the California Department of Education last year. But she wanted at least a 1,500 for her college applications.
"That's just what I thought I could do," she said.
She signed up for an SAT preparation class with some of her friends and they spent their Saturdays at California State University, Northridge. She practiced a few math tests and focused on reading comprehension - her weakest area. In her class, she learned strategies on how to conquer the infamous word analogies on the test, which she said she liked figuring out.
On the week before the test, on April 5, she had to focus on her IB tests. She had to create 12 projects for the art test, which she finished the day before the SAT.
The morning of the test, she said she was too nervous to eat. As she drove to the test site at Lancaster High School, her mother, Phawani, quizzed her on vocabulary.
"I didn't really want to take the test another time," she said. "I was hoping to get it over with this time."
After the three-hour test, she came home and checked on the questions she was uncertain about and learned she answered her vocabulary questions correctly. Her biggest uncertainty was the reading comprehension portion, because she couldn't check her answers at home.
On April 17, Amitha logged onto the SAT's Web site after school, called her father at work, and asked him if he would pay the SAT company $13 to find out early what she scored. He gave his permission; he was just as curious as she.
Then, she learned that she did it.
"I couldn't believe it," she said.
She did miss three questions: two in reading comprehension and one in math. But students can miss some questions and still receive the top score.
Amitha, who already had been bombarded with college recruitment materials, received the ultimate invitation: a letter from Harvard University.
"Before I made a 1,600, I was really looking into Berkeley," Amitha said. "I had a cousin who went to Berkeley."
The cousin who earned her undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley, will attend Harvard for her master's this fall.
Amitha hopes to join her there. She is planning a trip to Cambridge, Mass., this summer to visit the campus.
At Harvard, she plans to follow in her father's footsteps and major in management and finance. Her father is the business manager for Lancaster Cardiology.
"I've always been interested when I see what he does," she said. "I like working with numbers. Math is one of my strong subjects."
Although her plans to graduate with an IB degree prevent her from taking business classes at Quartz Hill High, she is the treasurer for Future Business Leaders of America and the Asian-Pacific Club on campus and was elected treasurer for the National Honors Society for the next school year. She also is a member of the Key Club and the California Scholastic Federation.
Her parents believe their daughter's academic achievements are a result of the education she has received in public schools. Amitha attends Quartz Hill but also attended Park View Middle and Sunnydale Elementary schools in the Lancaster School District.
"We feel very comfortable that she is getting a good education," her mother said. "It's there if they want to receive it."
Now Amitha's 14-year-old brother has a new challenge before him, her dad said. "She has set the challenge for my other son. He has the challenge on hand to perform equally," he said.
" PERFECT SCORE - Amitha Harichandran, a junior at Quartz Hill High School, scored 1,600 on the SAT. She plans to follow in her father's footsteps and major in management and finance at Harvard. " Either the SAT test, its scoring or most likely both have gotten significantly easier. It used to be there were only a handful of 1600 scores in the whole country, now articles like this are commonplace. Perfect 800 scores on either half of the test should also be extremely rare, yet they've had several at just this one school. I have the impression this is more than just the 50 point change from renorming the SAT a few years back. The top students deserve a challenge, generally enjoy one, and aren't getting one. The schools need scores to let them differentiate the best students from the merely very good ones. If instead of a Bell curve there are many results clustered at the high end than changes are needed. I don't care of the result of such changes hurts the self esteem... of school administrators and teachers' unions.
Why do they do that? Extra credit?
Yep. From this website:
In April 1995, the College Board recentered the score scales for all tests in the SAT Program to reflect the contemporary test taking population. Recentering reestablished the average score for a study group of 1990 seniors at about 500 --the midpoint of the 200 to 800 scale- - allowing students, schools, and colleges to more easily interpret their scores in relation to those of a similar group of college-bound seniors. Recentering also simplifies comparisons between students' verbal and mathematical abilities and improves reliability of the SAT Program scores and their ability to predict success in college.
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So, they changed the way the score is calculated to achieve some sort of goal in the range and distribution of scores for the stated reasons.
I was told by one administrator that if you want to compare your pre-1995 score with a modern score, you add about 40-50 points. Of course that rule of thumb doesn't work out to the extremes, but it's close (e.g. the girl in the story missed three questions which would have earned her a 1570 back in the day, a difference of 30 instead of 40-50.)
Geez! Haven't you heard? Indians ARE white people! Even if they do have brown skin.
Scr*w these modern-day amateurs. Class of '68 here, Kirkwood HS, Kirkwood, MO, and shot 1585 and 1591 (rats, I **still** don't know the Q(s) I missed!) in Nov 1966 and Oct 1967 respectively).
It's all BS, of course, but SAT simply wasn't all that difficult if one had paid even a little attention, and understood (intuitively or formally) a little bit of game theory.
There's really no excuse for ETS and SAT (or ACT), then or now. It is and they are just a profit centre benefiting from the ineptness of the alleged K-12 educational 'system'. 'Predictive of college success' is the usual (haha) rationale...yah, sure. Wattakwokakwap that is.
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