Student Achieves Perfect SAT Score

Nick Rodriguez of Oak Park wasn’t expecting to score a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

“It just kind of happened,” said the 17-year-old, who, with a cumulative grade point average of 4.38, starts his senior year at Oak Park High next week.

Nick, who has also earned high scores on six Advanced Placement exams, is setting his sights on a first-rank college.

He lists Harvard and UC Berkeley among the universities he is considering.

Nick’s 15-year-old sister, Melinda, is also an excellent student. She has a straight-A average and scored 1360 on the SAT when she was an eighth-grader at Medea Creek Middle School. She is similarly modest.

“I didn’t think I did that well,” said Melinda, who begins her freshman year at Oak Park High next week.

Neither sibling has a set plan for life after college, though Melinda said she enjoys art and Nick is interested in political science.

Their mother, Julie Rodriguez, 49, said academic achievement runs in the family. She earned her a bachelor’s degree in business administration at a university in Malaysia, where she grew up before coming to the United States.

And her husband, Joseph, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in business administration.

Although he is proud of his score, Nick says he does not place too much significance on it.

“I know lots of wonderfully bright people who don’t think the way the test asks you to think,” he said. And, he noted, academics are not always the most important thing in life.

“I figure sometimes it’s OK not to have all the answers,” he said.