As easy as A-C-T
Boyer took the ACT only three times before scoring perfectly on the college entrance exam.
Katherine Boyer has achieved perfection.
The senior at Bob Jones High School scored a perfect 36 on the ACT this past summer.
And in what may seem impossible for some, came easy to the 18-year-old, who scored a 29 on the college entrance exam when she was just in sixth grade.
“I knew the score was good, but wasn’t sure of the whole scale,” Boyer recalled.
She said it was “a really exciting night” when she first discovered she made a perfect score at the end of her junior year.
“The scores came in online and my mother kept refreshing the page and when she saw it, she started screaming,” Boyer said.
Boyer said she took the test numerous times, not because she was a perfectionist, but because she simply wanted to see how well she could do.
“I think if I hadn’t gotten it, I wouldn’t have taken it 10 more times until I finally did,” she said.
As a reward for her accomplishment, her father purchased a brand new MacBook Pro for her.
The national average ACT composite score for 2010 was a 21. How does someone take the ACT four times and score so much higher each time? Boyer said it was done with the will and determination she got from her parents, Thanh and John.
“My mom came here from Vietnam when she was a teenager and she didn’t have the same opportunities as I did,” Boyer said. “And my dad is always trying new things.”
Her mother, a homemaker, homeschooled Boyer and her brother, J.B, for her third and fourth-grade elementary years.
“We felt like the kids needed to be challenged more, so we homeschooled for a couple years” said John Boyer, Katherine’s father. “We came to the conclusion that they needed more socialization, so we ended up moving to Madison and chose this area partly because of the schools.”
Thanh said at the time the two were being homeschooled, there weren’t many social activities available, so they put them back into public school.
“We felt like our kids needed that,” Thanh said. “Being in music and band and being with others was important.”
Her parents took Boyer and her brother to Vietnam, where they saw first-hand the opportunities that weren’t there for their relatives. John said that also gave Boyer an incentive to perform to the best of her ability.
“We sponsored Thanh’s family over here and had 7 of them living with us in the house at one time,” he said. “All of them just pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and four of them became engineers. They started living the American dream and they were good role models.”
Bob Jones has 89 seniors who scores a 30 or above on this year’s ACT. One other student at the school received a 36. The average score of the 604 students tested was 23.7.
Sheila Roberts, college career counselor at Bob Jones, said excelling is “part of the culture” in the area and at the school.
“They expect students to succeed and (Boyer) just stepped out there,” Roberts said. While we are proud of her, a number of students could get a 36, we just don’t sit down and take the test all the time. She is a very bright and brilliant young lady. She took advantage of the opportunities here. She has a bright future ahead of her.”
As for now, Boyer is visiting colleges and filling out applications. She said the most nerve-wracking part of the spring semester next semester will be receiving letters back from schools and dealing with financial aid, but she said she is excited about college and is going to enjoy the rest of her senior year.
She said she has looked into Princeton and Harvard in the northeast and Vanderbilt and Emory closer to home.
“Right now, I’m considering having a biology or neuroscience major,” she said. “And I’m thinking about going to med school afterward.”
