For most students, getting a score of 800 on the mathematics portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test is a pipe dream. For Tim Sanders of Milledgville, Ga., it was a family affair.
Tim, a junior at Baldwin High School, attained the perfect score on the test he took in November, continuing a family tradition of perfect math scores that began with his brothers Mark, 24, and Dan, 22. He was one of 1,025 students who achieved a perfect score out of the million students who took the S.A.T. last year.
While he admits he didn’t study much for the test, which he took for the fourth time last November, he was relieved he had matched his brothers’ marks. “I would have never lived it down if I didn’t make it,” Tim says.
The Sanders brothers’ computational skills seem to run in the genes. Their father, Hugh, is a math professor at Georgia College, and a few uncles and grandparents were engineers.
Elder brother Mark is studying to become a middle-school teacher, and Dan is a graduate student, majoring in some “unpronounceable branch of math” Tim says.
While his brothers have followed the scholarly route, Tim sees another career possibility--one that does not include Cartesian graphs and polynomials.
“I don’t know if my parents have accepted the fact yet, but I see myself as an actor,” says Tim, who recently auditioned for a part in the non-numerically-inclined play “Our Town.”
