MIAMI – A student at Ransom Everglades in Miami is just one of 11 students in the world who got a perfect score this year on the AP Calculus BC exam.
"I was very excited. I was very proud. My parents were also very excited," John Mistele said. "I was super excited to sort of have accomplished this not just for myself, but also for my friends and math teachers I’ve had at Ransom."
Ransom Everglades spokeswoman Amy Shipley said Mistele, who is a senior at the school, answered every question correctly on the 3-hour, 15-minute exam, which includes 45 multiple-choice questions and six free-response questions.
"I've worked in independent schools for 36 years, and I've never seen an achievement like this," head of school Penny Townsend said. "We are so proud of John, who works very hard to make the most of his exceptional gifts, and we are also grateful to our outstanding teachers. All of us share in his joy today."
Mistele ranked No. 1 in Florida last year in statistics and earned a perfect score at the Mu Alpha Theta State Championship Conference in Orlando in April.
"Every year, I tell my students that I've heard of these letters that go out to different people when they get a perfect score, but I've never received one," Mistele's math teacher, Dr. Henry Stavisky, said. "That accomplishment was one of my dreams, and he did it."
More than 120,000 students took the AP calculus exam this year.
"That's history in the making," Stavisky said. "This school has never gotten a letter like that, so John has pretty much put Ransom on the map in the United States and I'm very proud of him."
Mistele is taking other AP classes this school year, including AP physics, AP French language and culture, AP U.S. government and AP English literature. He is also taking linear algebra and photography.
He has applied to Stanford, MIT, Princeton and Harvard.