Maryland Student Lands Perfect ACT Score
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Handout/Sayyeed Mohammed(CLARKSVILLE, Md.) — Maryland high school student Taariq Mohammed is perfect, at least according to the ACT test.
The 16-year-old student at River Hill High School in Clarksville, Md., scored a perfect 36 on the college entrance test, an achievement that only a fraction of one percent of students in the country can claim.
For this driven high school student, preparation for perfection started early.
“When I was going into my freshman year of high school I started studying for both the SAT and the ACT,” Mohammed said. The first time he took the test as a sophomore, Mohammed received a 34, a score most students would be satisfied with.
But close to perfect wasn’t good enough for Mohammed.
“I was happy with it, but I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed,” he said. “I knew I was close to being perfect and I was confident that I could get a perfect ACT score.”
He took it a second time in June, and got the score he was hoping for.
Mohammed, who is a straight-A student, a black belt in Karate, and a varsity wrestler, also came within just 50 points of a perfect score on the SAT as well.
Like his two brothers Saud and Isa, Mohammed hopes to attend Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and eventually become a doctor.
His father Sayyeed Mohammed, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, is very much the proud parent, but wasn’t surprised by his son’s success.
“Tariq was always very ambitious,” he said. “Fortunately for him, he has two brothers who are really very close to him. He was very fortunate to know how to plan ahead carefully for what he needed to do and plan out his four year high school career.”
“And he executed it to perfection.”
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio