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Show Student aces 9 College boards NEW YORK (AP)-Tony Kwong Jr., 16, is such a worrier that he took the College Board exams three times-and earned perfect scores on nine mathematics and science tests. The fledgling mathematician didn't score as well on his verbal tests, 696 out of a possible 800. But he is a Chinese immigrant who arrived from his native Hong Kong only two years ago. And 696, with his grades, could get him into any college in the country. Tony is a slender and handsome boy who ranks fifth in his senior class at Seward Park High School, the school most of the city's Chinese-American teen-agers attend. He started taking the college entrance examinations as a junior last'May-for practice. He took them officially last December and then, worried that he hadn't done well enough, he took them again in January. He needn't have worried. He won perfect scores on the mathematics, physics, and chemistry tests twice each and won three more 800s in math achievement and aptitude tests. Tony learned his English at an Irish mission school in Hong Kong, speaks it with the kind of perfection that indicates he learned it at school, and considers himself bilingual. Miss Margaret Thome, who directs the College Board testing program, said Kwong could be credited with only four perfect scores because the others are duplicates although each was won on different tests. His achievement of four perfect scores "is matched by at least 16 other students this year," she said. That still places him among the top 17 pupils of the 1.4 million who took College Boards this year. Kwong has four brothers and sisters. Their father is manager of a small garment factory in Manhattan's Chinatown. Tony hopes someday to teach math at college or become an industrial math researcher. But first there's college. He applied to Princeton, City College, Cooper Union and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in that order, and hopes for a scholarship from Princeton. |