East Valley junior aces national ACT exam

Tim Ngo, a junior at East Valley High School, earned a composite score of 36 on the ACT – the highest score one can receive.

The ACT evaluates students in four different areas – English, math, reading and science. Students now have the option of adding an essay to their tests, which Ngo took. There are 215 multiple-choice questions and the test is administered with pencil and paper over a period of three-and-a-half hours.

Ngo said he wasn’t very confident going into the test.

“I felt pretty good coming out of it,” he said.

He’s a fan of academics. He’s in the honor society and on the award-winning Knowledge Bowl team. This spring, he traveled to Washington, D.C., with the school’s History Bowl team to compete at the national level.

“It was pretty tough,” he said of the competition. The team finished in the middle of the pack.

While there, the team spent a couple of days sightseeing. They visited Smithsonian museums and took a bus tour at night to see the monuments.

This summer, he’ll travel to Europe with his Advanced Placement European history class, an annual event for the students. They will visit France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.

The ACT wasn’t the last of his college aptitude testing. He is waiting to find out what he scored on the SAT, which he took a couple of weeks ago.

“They’re not that different,” he said of the two tests.

He hopes his scores will get the attention of prospective colleges – he’s thinking of applying to Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and maybe the University of Washington to study engineering.