CINCINNATI - Seventeen Walnut Hills High School earned a perfect score of 36 on the ACT, a standardized test used for college admission, according to Cincinnati Public Schools.
Walnut Hills is the top-ranked high school in Ohio, according to USNews.
That’s pretty amazing!
Magnet school. Still amazing.
Sometimes things like that clump together, we have a little bit of that on our street of around 30 homes (most without HS age children), one kid going to Harvard, one to UChicago, and one to Caltech.
Walnut Hills had about 25 kids who were NMSF this year. NMSF is approximately equivalent to top 16,000 on PSAT. There were 3,741 36 composites last year. Based on those numbers, you’d expect somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 36s each year. 17 is a bit out of the ordinary, but certainly not unbelievable for a school where a significant number of kids regularly score very highly on standardized testing.
17 is extraordinary high. Last year (actually end of 2017) with all the dragon kids, my kid’s HS had 50 NMSF, 7 with 36 ACT. A lot of it is regional, I think on either coast ACT is not as popular.
Stevenson High School in Illinois has 30 seniors with a perfect 36.
https://shsdailydigest.com/2018/12/12/wednesday-dec-12-2018/
Although if you are gunning for the maximum score (e.g. for the University of Alabama Presidential Elite Scholarship), the ACT may be a better choice for a student who does equally well on both tests. This is because the ACT is coarser score intervals, so that each ACT score has concordance with four SAT scores (e.g. 36 ACT has concordance with 1570, 1580, 1590, 1600 SAT), and because the ACT composite does not require each subsection to have the maximum score to get a maximum composite score (e.g. 35, 35, 36, 36 is averaged to 35.5 and rounded up to 36) while a maximum SAT score requires maximum scores on both subsections.