Colin Defant achieves a perfect 36
By B.C. Manion
When Colin Defant considers his future, the letters M-I-T come to mind.
The junior in Land O’ Lakes High’s International Baccalaureate Program has set his sights on attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., and hopes one day to be a mathematics professor at the university.
He realizes these are lofty ambitions, but one of his recent accomplishments may cause admissions officials at MIT to take a closer look at his application.
Defant is among roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of ACT test-takers to achieve a perfect score of 36.
The ACT includes tests in English, mathematics, reading and science. Of the 1.6 million test-takers in the class of 2011, only 704 can claim a perfect score, according to ACT officials. Each test scored on a scale of 1 to 36. The composite score is the average of the four tests.
All major colleges in the United States accept the ACT score, and a student’s performance often is one of the factors considered during the selection process.
Defant, who has a quiet confidence about him, said he actually wasn’t terribly surprised by the perfect score.
“It was easy to understand the science, even if I hadn’t seen it before in an actual science class because it was a lot of reading graphs,” Defant said.
“I’m good at math,” added Defant, who is the founder of the school’s Mu Alpha Theta mathematics club.
Although he topped out on every aspect of the exam, Defant most enjoys solving mathematics problems. He discovered his affinity for mathematics when he was involved in the Duke Talent Identification Program, which offers the SAT to high-achieving seventh-graders. During the practice SAT tests, Defant found out how much he enjoyed solving the mathematics problems.
“It was like a puzzle,” said Defant, who is the son of Marc and Susan Defant and lives near Dade City.
He still gets a kick out of solving tough problems and often is working ahead of material taught in class because he enjoys the challenge of learning on his own.
During his down time in the summer, he likes tooling around on his computer, looking for challenging math problems.
“I like that everything in math is concrete. There’s one answer, usually, in most cases. I like that. You can prove things to be absolutely true. It’s not an opinion,” Defant said.
Despite his performance on the ACT, Defant’s advice for future test-takers was limited.
