Whether students like it or not, the SAT is a huge part in determining where a student will attend college. Many students see putting their number two pencil to their scantron of the SAT in their near-silent testing room as one of the most stressful tests of their entire life. With this ridiculous amount of stress, students can either thrive or fall short of their hopes in getting the score their first 17 or so years of life has been working towards. Celebrating the success of their insanely high score is Battlefield junior Tristan Baird.

“I felt confident in my score following the test, but I am pleasantly surprised with how well I actually did,” states Baird. “Opening CollegeBoard October 27th was incredibly stressful, but seeing the 1540 in bolded font at the top of the page helped a lot of that stress to dissipate away almost instantly.”

Although Baird is not a fan of relishing in his successes, a 1540 is ridiculous. Baird’s 1540 SAT score puts him at the top of the top for scores. In fact, Prepscholar even puts this “as in the top 99.5923%.” It does not get much better than that. Not to mention this was only Baird’s first attempt at the SAT, making the success even more impressive. The reaching of his overly-impressive score was not by coincidence.

“Although my SAT was October 1st, I was studying even in the summer. I wanted to be as prepared as possible. I believe it played a key part in my success,” Baird adds.

“He is not lying,” states Battlefield junior Tanner Kaplan, long time friend of Baird. “I would ask him what he was up to most summer days and a large portion of the time it would be along the lines of ‘I have SAT prep at 3:30, not today’. I was not one to blame him for this, in fact I am glad for him. He received an excellent score and he certainly deserved it.”

Baird will have much more time to be able to meet up with friends now. “For the time being, I am not planning on having another attempt at the SAT. A 1540 is more than satisfying for me. My plan may change and I may possibly take another shot at the long sought after 1600, but it is not my current focus.”

With a score like a 1540, who could blame him? Being in the top 99.5923% is more than enough to put Baird through to an excellent college of his choice, and combined with his well-over 4.0 GPA through sophomore year and wide variety of sports and extracurriculars, what’s to stop him from achieving even higher?