Sarasota Native Earns Perfect Score On AP Macroeconomics Exam

The College Board recently announced that Pine View School graduate Anthony Grebe of Sarasota earned every point possible on the Advanced Placement Macroeconomics exam he took in May.

Grebe, who currently attends Washington University in St. Louis, was one of only 17 students to earn the distinction among the almost 100,000 students around the world who took the test in 2012. The College Board administers the AP Program and recently informed Grebe and Pine View Principal Steve Largo about the rare achievement.

“We congratulations Anthony on this outstanding accomplishment,” said Largo. “We’d also like to recognize Sharda Jagdish, his AP Macroeconomics teacher, for her ability to engage students and help give them the tools they need to excel in a college-level course.”

Advanced Placement exams are based on a composite score of 1 to 5, where 5 is equivalent to a grade of A in the corresponding college course. Grebe not only received the top score of 5 – ranking among 15.5 percent of students to fall within this top score category in 2012 – but in doing so, was one of only 17 students in the world to earn every point possible on the Macroeconomics exam, answering every multiple-choice question correctly and earning full points on each of the essays in the free-response section of the exam (90 out of a possible 90 points). In total, 99,903 students took the AP Macroeconomics exam in 2012.

The AP exams are written and scored by college professors from around the world and are typically designed to cover a full year of intensive, college-level knowledge and skills, so it is very rare for a high school student to earn every point possible on any AP exam. In 2012, just over 2 million students at more than 18,000 high schools took 3.7 million AP exams across a range of subjects. Only 88 students earned every point possible – a result characterized by the College Board’s AP Program as “an extraordinary academic achievement.”

The College Board’s Advanced Placement Program provides willing and academically prepared students with the opportunity to take rigorous college-level courses while still in high school. Students received scores of 3 or higher on nearly 60 percent of these exams, potentially qualifying them for college credit, advanced placement or both at colleges and universities worldwide.

Grebe also won $6,000 in a national math contest in 2011.