(KRON) — Two high school students in San Jose achieved perfect scores on their AP calculus exams, school officials announced Monday. The stellar students, Ritwin Narra and Kaylee Nguyen, secured all 108 out of a possible 108 points on the demanding exam.
Narra and Nguyen were two of only 16 students worldwide to finish the annual AP Calculus BC Exam flawlessly last spring, a letter from Advanced Placement Program officials states.
Their teacher at Silver Creek High School, Ms. Leena Guttal, has been teaching advanced math for 28 years. After Ms. Guttal was notified of her students’ scores, she felt overwhelmed with joy. “Two students out of 16 in the whole world are my students!” she said.
Nguyen’s mathematics studies were “very meticulous and thorough. And she was very hardworking, too. She didn’t take it for granted,” the teacher said.
“Ritwin always had an answer for any problem that I give him. It was so hard to challenge him. He always had a different way of doing problems,” Guttal said.
Compared to solving problems from his teacher’s math lessons, taking the AP exam seemed like “the easy part,” Narra said.
Narra gave credit to his teacher for going “way above and beyond the AP curriculum. Ms. Guttal’s teaching is very rigorous and very comprehensive. And this is also shown by Ms. Guttal’s 5-rate. She has had almost every single person in every one of her classes get a five in her 20+ years of teaching,” he said.
Guttal said her students motivate and inspire her to continue teaching. “Every day I reflect on it. That’s what motivates me to come and teach every day… It’s an honor to be their calculus teacher,” she said.
Narra is currently a junior at Silver Creek High School, and Nguyen is attending University of California in San Diego.
