MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Grant Prater, a seventeen-year-old former home-schooler and now a rising senior at the LAMP School in Montgomery, has achieved the seemingly impossible: he received perfect scores on both the SAT and the ACT.
Prater earned a 36 on the ACT and a 2400 on his SAT after attempting the tests every year since 8th grade. He accomplished this feat as only a junior Montgomery Public Schools’ student attending Loveless Academic Magnet Program with one year of high school still to complete.
The young man has a general idea of what he plans to do in college, but he is not quite sure of the specifics. “I’d like to do something in the STEM fields, but I don’t know beyond that,” Prater told the Montgomery Advertiser. “The dream college in that field would be MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and that would be the one that I would be super excited to go to, where it’s the high-tech fields.”
What Prater pulled off is a statistical marvel to say the least. Only about .06 percent of students who take the ACT ever earn such a score and less than .02 percent who take the SAT do the same. That proportion breaks down to about 300 out of the 1.6 million test takers each year. The average 2014 ACT score for Alabama students was only 20.6.
Being raised in an Air Force family, the Praters were constantly on the move and homeschooling was the best option. For the first eleven years of his academic career, Grant was home-schooled by his mom and dad. They moved to Montgomery last summer from Louisiana.
Grant’s parents knew early on that they had a bright child on their hands. “Even at the age of 4, I remember he was going to bed and he normally went to bed at 8 p.m. and it was 9:04 p.m. He said, ‘It’s 64 minutes past my bedtime,’ and I just remember thinking, ‘My gosh, you’re only 4 and you realize there is 60 minutes in an hour?’” said Grant’s mother Traci.
Because of the hard work of his parents and the help he received from teachers his one year at LAMP, Prater believes he was set up well for success.
The only fear that the 17-year-old has is that people will hear about his scores and begin to view him differently. “Getting the scores is good. … I feel proud that I was able to do that, because they’re not really easy tests, but I don’t want that to define who I am,” Prater said.
One problem he certainly will not have to deal with is college acceptance. While it is typical for student to seek out interested schools, numerous universities have already reportedly sent applications to him.
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