Advanced Placement

Whiz kid Steve Lu was having an off day when he took the SAT at age 9 last year. The high school kids were staring and calling him names like Doogie Howser, and Steve got flustered.

Though he scored 710 on the math portion, he knows he can do better. And he refuses to discuss the verbal section, since it was below 700.

Still, the Torrance resident did well enough to start college Monday at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, where at age 10 he is the youngest student on campus, and, campus officials said, probably the youngest student ever to enroll full-time in the state university system.

He might be the only entering freshman who collects Power Rangers. He also likes Disney movies, hamburgers and pizza, and the mere mention of the Chuck E. Cheese pizza and game parlor, his self-described favorite place in the whole world, sends him into a spin.

Young boy that he is, Steve’s IQ is outsized at 194; the average person’s IQ is from 95 to 109. In kindergarten, teachers said he was hyperactive and assumed that he suffered from attention deficit disorder, but testing showed that Steve was highly gifted. He wasn’t hyperactive, just bored.

Since then, the child prodigy’s academic pace has picked up. He completed 12 years of pre-college education in less than five years, taking a high school degree last month from a correspondence school in Long Beach.

Steve made the decision to go to college

“I’m still a kid,” he said. “I like to cut and paste and do all that fun stuff but I was bored with school and that took up more time than cutting and pasting.”

He still plays basketball with the neighborhood kids and is enrolled in cello and piano lessons, along with Chinese language school.

His parents, Nancy and Simon Lu, said they supported their son’s decision solely because they have been unable to find an affordable public or private school that would challenge him.

In many ways Lu’s parents say that dealing with their son is like having a special-needs child. Steve Lu requires a lot of attention and does not fit into today’s school system.

“If he was handicapped there would be a place for him to go, but this is the opposite end of that spectrum,” said Simon Lu, a computer programmer.

With one intellectual marvel enrolled in college, Steve’s parents now hope to spend more time with his 7-year-old sister Mary, who recently scored 189 on an IQ test. Mary already is in third grade at the Harbor Math Science Gifted Magnet School in San Pedro, but her mother says she has quickly become bored.