A 17-year-old math wiz from Los Angeles joined an exclusive club of only a dozen students in the world to have earned a perfect score on the AP Calculus exam last spring.
Cedrick Argueta, a senior at Lincoln High School, learned last week that of the 302,532 students who took the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam in May, he and 11 others turned in a flawless test, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District.
"It's the most important achievement in my 17 years," Cedrick said.
In addition to what test officials called a "superior" performance on the college-level exam made up of more than 60 multiple-choice and free-response questions, Cedrick also earned perfect scores on the English and math sections of the ACT college-entrance exam, the LAUSD said.
"All the credit can't come to me," Cedrick said. "I have to give credit to all my classmates and my teachers. Not just my teacher Mr. (Anthony) Yom - he's a great teacher - but all my teachers that came before him in my elementary and middle school. "
His father Marco Argueta was so proud, he purchased 10 copies of a Spanish-language newspaper that ran a front-page story calling Cedrick a genius.
"I bought many newspapers to send to my sisters in El Salvador," the beaming dad told Telemundo 52.
Cedrick, who volunteers at the Bonnie Brae Convalescent Hospital where both of his parents work, hopes to get accepted to Caltech as the first step toward an engineering career with NASA JPL.
