Two juniors achieve rare perfect scores on AP Comp Science exam

Juniors Uma Phalke and Anthony Wang were the only Saratoga students to be among the 356 students globally who aced it.

Juniors Anthony Wang and Uma Phalke received perfect scores on the May 2021 AP Computer Science A (AP CS) exam, according to a Friday newsletter sent out by principal Greg Louie on Oct. 22. Only 356 students worldwide who took the exam in 2021 achieved this feat.

Phalke, who found out that she scored perfectly on the exam by scanning through the Friday newsletter, was pleasantly surprised.

“The test was a three-hour exam and I finished the test in an hour and 40 minutes, so I thought I either did something very wrong or very right,” she said. “I assumed it was very wrong, but then when the score came out, I was very surprised.”

Phalke said she did not receive outside of class tutoring or have previous experience with coding other than the on campus Intro to Programming course that she took before taking AP CS.

Phalke attributes her success on the test to how she always tried her best in the class taught by Thomas Wang. She focused on learning the foundations and concepts rather than just memorizing. She made sure to understand the language and altered the way she thought to cater to computer science.

Phalke said Mr. Wang was able to help her gain a deeper understanding despite the class being over Zoom and not having as many interactions as in-person teaching, she said.

“When we were working on projects he very articulately explained any questions I had and any problems in my programs that I was creating,” she said. “He particularly taught me a strategy to find the problem rather than just telling me what the problem was, and that was another fundamental that really made me understand CS.”

She encourages other students in AP CS to avoid procrastinating up until the exam and instead ask questions and understand concepts from the beginning. Though this applies to all classes, Phalke believes it is especially vital for AP CS because of its difficult nature as a coding language.

“Just like learning [a foreign language], you need to understand the vocabulary in the beginning or else it’s going to be really hard,” Phalke said. “You need to understand the fundamentals first in the beginning of the class.”

In contrast, Anthony Wang had taken the class with a few years of CS experience under his belt. He started coding in middle school, where he mainly focused on game development through Scratch, Javascript graphics libraries and Java game development.

“[Creating games] was just fun to me,” Anthony said.

In February 2017, he participated in his first USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) programming competition, which is mainly focused on algorithms, and was able to reach the Platinum division, the highest level, in spring 2020.

He used the C++ programming language for the competition and took classes at AlphaStar to prepare. Most of the time he spends on programming is during the summer and during breaks in the school year.

While he had received an email from CollegeBoard saying that he achieved a perfect score on the AP CS A exam, he did not realize initially and just knew he got a five.

He was surprised when he was informed that he received a perfect score, as he said he usually has some sort of error in the free-response portion of the exam.

He encourages other students to try their best and aim for a good score, but not try to score perfectly.

“You should not aim for a perfect score because it’s hard to get it. It’s a lot of luck,” Anthony said. “You want to aim for a reasonable goal … Your goal should not be perfect.”