Hours of practice time and an intense push to learn from her mistakes have propelled Piscataway High School senior Saanvi Patel to a rare achievement: a perfect 800 on the Math portion of the SAT.

“I took a lot of effort over the summer studying for the SAT,” she said. “I spent at least a half an hour to an hour a day doing practice problems, especially for math. I was just glad that my hard work paid off.”

Saanvi’s level of excellence is achieved by fewer than 1% of test takers nationwide. She also scored a 760 on her Verbal portion, giving her an amazing 1560 overall score.

“Saanvi’s perfect 800 on the Math SAT is an extraordinary achievement,” said PHS Principal Chris Baldassano. “It reflects her talent and dedication, as well as the outstanding work of our teachers and the supportive environment of our school priorities.  We are incredibly proud of her and of the educators who helped her reach this milestone.”

Saanvi’s parents are just as proud.

“They saw me spend a lot of time studying for it over the summer,” she said. “That morning when I got to school, I was checking on my computer to see if the scores came out. When it came out, I sent it to them online and they were just very ecstatic.”

Saanvi had taken the SAT twice before and was focused on improving her score by correcting her mistakes.

“If I made a mistake on a certain question while practicing, I would write down what I made a mistake on and why I made it,” she said. “A lot of times, it was a time constraint, so I would work on doing more practice problems under a time constraint so that I knew how to manage my time better during the test. Or if it was a concept, then study the concept that I wasn’t sure of.”

Looking toward the future, Saanvi isn’t sure where she is going to college yet, but has applied to Rutgers, Pittsburgh, and Yale so far. She plans to major in neuroscience with the goal of becoming a neuropsychiatrist.

Scoring 800 on her Math SAT has not altered her college plans but “the score did give me more confidence in applying to them,” she said, “because I knew it was a good score that I could proudly present to the colleges.”

Studying over the summer gave Saanvi time to focus and reduced the stress level because she didn’t also have to focus on schoolwork or extracurriculars. She is a member of the Mu Alpha Theta math honor society and is vice president of the Science National Honor Society, which fosters her love for science.

“My role is preparing different experiments,” she said of SNHS. “For example, at the club fair, I prepared a strawberry DNA extraction, where I taught the freshmen and sophomores how to extract strawberry DNA, and that kind of motivated them to join SNHS. I was using that as an example of the types of activities we would do as a club.”

She also helps the club to prepare for Family Science Night, when high school students host younger students for engaging experiments.

When asked what advice she would give a fellow student who is beginning to prepare for the SAT, Saanvi went beyond the virtues of hard work.

“The SAT, honestly, it’s not as much as a measure of how much you know, as much as it is a measure of how well you can take the test,” she said. “Even though the question seems very complex, you have to find the pattern and the ways that the College Board tries to trick you to make you choose the wrong answer. So once you learn the test and its methods, you can maneuver around them.

“Also, learn from your mistakes.”