L.A. Student Aces Out U.S. Test Takers

George Lee is a standout, even at a high school known nationally for its prowess in turning out Advanced Placement scholars.

Lee, who graduated first in his class in June from the North Hollywood High Magnet School for the highly gifted, is this year’s top National Advanced Placement Scholar, earning the highest score among students nationwide who took more than eight Advanced Placement tests.

Advanced Placement courses are offered to high school students in a variety of fields. If they score 3 or better--out of a possible 5--on Advanced Placement tests, they can earn college credit.

Other U.S. students may have taken more tests overall--Advanced Placement administers 31 tests in 18 subject areas--but none scored as consistently high as often as Lee, who scored 5 on 15 exams and 4 on three others, officials said.

In an interview Monday from his dorm room at UC Berkeley, Lee, 17, rattled off the nine Advanced Placement tests he took in his senior year: art history, U.S. government, macroeconomics, microeconomics, comparative government, Spanish, English literature, statistics and biology.

He earned a top score of 5 on six of them and a 4 on the other three.

In his junior year, he took nine exams.

Officials at the Advanced Placement College Board in New York said students like Lee are highly unusual.

“He had an extraordinarily high average, very close to a 5.0,” said Wade Curry, executive director of the program. “He is obviously an outstanding student who has tremendous ability and tremendous promise.”

Although Lee said he wasn’t surprised to learn that he was the nation’s top test taker, he credited his alma mater for his success.

“A lot of this was due to my school,” he said. “They offer so many AP tests, which is great, and the teachers are very supportive. They really want the kids to do well. I think that helped me quite a bit.”

An avid bridge player who was a member of his high school tennis team, Lee said he had a pretty normal school life, in spite of the hours spent studying for the exams.

“I liked my high school years,” he said. “I didn’t think the APs were that much of a load. It takes up a lot of time, but I managed to work it into my schedule.”

As a student in the only Los Angeles Unified School District high school for highly gifted students--with an IQ of 145 or better--Lee said the two- and three-hour tests were an extension of his school life.

Two of his North Hollywood classmates, Carmel Levitan, now at Stanford University, and Howard Chong, also at Berkeley, joined Lee among the top five 1997 National AP Scholars.

Lee was also named the top male Advanced Placement State Scholar of 1997, while Levitan earned the top scholar distinction among female students.

Susan Bonoff, a North Hollywood High college counselor, called the tests a “full-scale event” on campus, with students in the regular high school getting into the act along with those in the magnet programs.

“It’s a big commitment here,” she said. “It’s like one degree of separation. You’re either taking an AP exam, or you know someone who is taking them.”

Curry said North Hollywood has long been a top contender in the program, consistently delivering the largest number of national Advanced Placement scholars in the top 20.

Although Lee earned enough college credit with the exams to enter the university as a sophomore, he said he is classified as a freshman because he hasn’t declared a major.

Lee said his parents, Diane, an accountant, and Peter, an aeronautics engineer, encouraged him to succeed but never pushed him to excel.

Lee said he set his sights on taking the advanced courses from the beginning of high school.

“I felt that if I had a choice between an AP course and a non-AP course, I’d choose AP, no question,” he said.

He will be honored at the annual Advanced Placement convention in Chicago on Oct. 28.