Anh scored a flawless 1600 on the SAT late last year, placing him among roughly 2,000 test-takers worldwide who achieve a perfect score each year out of more than two million. He is a student in the English 1 class at Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, one of Vietnam’s most academically selective public schools.
The path to that score was anything but effortless. His SAT tutor, Nghiem Duc An, said Anh had completed 47% of his curated bank of 888 practice tests over approximately 1.5 years of preparation, working through more than 400 in total.
“At some points, he was doing three to four tests a day,” An said.
Anh began preparing seriously when he entered 10th grade, targeting both sections of the digital SAT: Reading and Writing, which has 54 questions, and Math, with 44 questions, all completed in just over two hours.
His first attempt in August 2025 produced a score of 1570, well within the 99th percentile but not the number he wanted. He lost points on two inference questions in the Reading and Writing sections, the type he considers the most difficult on the entire test.
“Even though I had eliminated two wrong answers, a lack of luck and insufficiently deep reasoning led me to choose the wrong one out of the remaining two options,” Anh said. Rather than accept a near-perfect score, he resolved to sit the test again. “I wanted to prove to myself I could do it with a perfect number.”
He spent the next three months refining his approach. For the Math section, he found that content was concentrated on middle school and 10th grade material spanning algebra and geometry. His secret weapon was Desmos, the graphing calculator built into the digital SAT.
“If you can perfectly use the Desmos features integrated into the test, you can virtually guarantee a perfect score. It helps solve graph-related problems and calculations extremely quickly,” he said.
For Reading and Writing, the sections that had cost him on his first attempt, Anh overhauled his vocabulary strategy. He adopted a “root words” method, learning prefixes, suffixes and Latin and Greek roots to decode unfamiliar words on the spot.
“English originates from many different languages. Learning prefixes and suffixes like ‘in-,’ ‘un-,’ ‘pre-,’ or roots like ‘cre-,’ ‘plac-,’ ‘mal-‘ helps me guess the meaning of unfamiliar words even when I’ve never seen them before,” he said.
He also changed how he reviewed practice tests. Instead of simply checking which answers were right or wrong, he began analyzing why each incorrect option was designed to look plausible. He kept a daily-review notebook of common traps. In grammar questions, he noted, the SAT often uses extremely long noun phrases as subjects to make it harder for test-takers to identify the main verb and choose the correct tense.
That deeper preparation was tested on exam day when he hit an inference question about negative reviews. He deliberated for five full minutes, weighing two answers that both seemed defensible. He chose correctly.
One Math question also gave him a brief scare: a spatial geometry problem requiring a free-response answer that did not specify how many decimal places to round to. Playing it safe, he entered the maximum number of characters the system allowed.
When his score came back as 1600, the months of relentless preparation had paid off in full. Anh’s tutor said discipline, more than raw talent, was the decisive factor.
“Over roughly 1.5 years, Anh worked through more than 400 tests,” An said. “That kind of consistency is what separates a 1570 from a 1600.”
Anh plans to use his score for both domestic university admissions in Vietnam and applications to U.S. universities, where he intends to study science. His advice for other test-takers is to resist the temptation to memorize or predict topics, since the SAT draws from an enormous range of subjects spanning natural sciences, social sciences, economics and philosophy.
“The most important thing is to read every word and pay careful attention to every small detail, because just one word can change the meaning of an entire passage,” he said.
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