Well Alrighty Now! Teen Achieves Perfect Score ON SATs

Every year teens struggle to study and get through the nation’s most-widely-used college admission exam, the SATs, and only a small handful ever achieve a perfect score.  Cameron Clarke (pictured), a senior at Germantown Academy in Fort Washington, Pa., just happens to fall in to the category of “perfect scorer,” according to the Huffington Post.

Clarke scored 2400, a perfect score, this past spring, and according to SAT officials, out of the 1.6 million of its test-takers this year, a mere 360 were able to achieve the grade.

So what’s his secret on achieving such a perfect score?

“I put in a lot of work. I took a prep class with some of my friends, and I did a lot of practice tests from a book, said the Mounty Airy resident.

The high school senior actually took the SAT once before and scored a still-mind-boggling 2190, which is a chart-topping 98.5 percent of all of the SAT’s test-takers.

Even though Clarke’s first score was a passkey that could get him in to any Ivy League college or university in the country, he was not satisfied and wanted to go for that gold ring.

In the wake of all of the negativity that surrounds so many Black youths these days, it is refreshing to see overachievers like Clarke. The 18-year-old, who has attended Germantown, a private school, since he was in preschool, was always considered to be gifted.

He took an IQ test when he was 4 years old and wound up with a score of 151, a number that is essentially 3 standard deviations above the average and is well in to the genius range. Some consider genius to begin near an IQ of 140, so it is highly uncommon to have an IQ in this range. According to statistics, less than 1 percent of the population would be able to achieve this score, with roughly 1 in 450 people achieving this IQ.

Not only is Clarke academically gifted, but he is musically inclined as well. A principal cellist for the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, he performed this past summer at the prestigious Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. The youth tutors fellow classmates, writes for his school paper, is active in his school’s math club, and is a senator in his school’s student government.

Now that Clarke has received a perfect score on his SATs, he is looking to continue his education at Princeton University, his dream school.

Clarke, who will be graduating next June, already seems to have quite a following, with Alfonzo Porter, a former high school principal and the author of “More Like Barack, Less Like Tupac: Eradicating the Academic Achievement Gap by Countering Three Decades of the Hip Hop Hoax,” telling the Huffington Post, “I have seen far too much talent wasted. Our young genius Black children, particularly boys, too often wind up in the cemetery and jail,” said Porter. “Hearing about perfect SAT scores is unfortunately the exception.”

By Ruth Manuel-Logan

http://newsone.com/2108143/cameron-clarke-pennsylvania/