160 Students Honored for Top Performance on AP Exams

A total of 160 Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) students--by far the largest number ever--were among the nation's top performers on the Advanced Placement (AP) exams last spring, according to The College Board.

In addition, the county number of AP Scholars, Scholars with Honors, and Scholars with Distinction continued to set record highs.

MCPS had 20 National Advanced Placement Scholars in 2003 and 121 in 2004, compared with this year's high of 160. The strong performances on these stringent exams highlight the school system's continuing efforts to increase academic rigor and encourage a greater number of students to take and succeed in AP courses.

Students become National AP Scholars by scoring an average grade of 4 or higher (out of 5 possible points) on eight or more AP exams for full-year, college-level courses.

One of this year's scholars, Martino Choi of Montgomery Blair High School, also was designated a State AP Scholar, one of two in Maryland.

The National AP Scholars from MCPS are:

Bethesda-Chevy Chase: Emily Bartlett, Brendan Clarke, Hannah Flamm, Martin Koenig, Euhbin Song

Montgomery Blair: Douglas Adams, Daniel Aisen, Alexander Alm, Wilma Bainbridge, Jeffrey Cao, Daniel Chamberlain, Vivek Chellappa, Jonathan Chiang, Patrick Detzner, Rohit Dewan, William Dreher, Jeffrey Dunn, Frederick Esch, Abigail Fraeman, Jeremy Goodman, Ariel Halper-Stromber, Dan Han, Gregory Howard, Grace Huang, Andy Jiang, Matthew Jordan, Ravi Joseph, Ashley Jurinka, Kevin Kahn, John Kim, Saul Kinter, Siwei Kwok, James Lee, Kendra Leigh, Xiaoke Li, Yueyang Li, Eric Ma, Alexander Mont, Teresa Ramirez, John Silberholz, Adrienne Smith, Denis Sosnovtsev, Timothy Sy, Nicholas Tucker, Prasanna Vasudevan, Jacqueline Villadsen, Kathy Wang, Max Wasserman, David White, Samuel Wight, Min Wu, Kristina Yang, Jessica Yen, Lida You, Katherine Zhang, Yuan Zhang

James Hubert Blake: Gilad Barlev, Clare Boyle, Michael Lanning

Winston Churchill: Natalie Barber, Alicia Chen, Steven Chen, Matthew Cheng, Matthew Chung, Abigail Fradkin, Gregory Hitz, John Le, Jeffry Liu, Jordana Merran, Benjamin Striner, Yao Yang

Walter Johnson: Selma Amrane, Jessica Chan, James Coan, Kyrstin Fornace, Kristina Gaddy, Dena Greenblum, Soo Chin Han, Zachary Hommer, Luukas Ilves, Nirav Joshi, Erin Kazaz, Phillip Kim, Tracy Li, John Lind-say, Julia Moriarty, David Petrovics, Philippe Pradel, Yuriy Sverchkov, Zachary Ulissi

Col. Zadok Magruder: James Fliakas, Erica Guy, Yishan Zhou

Richard Montgomery: Karthik Balakrishnan, Michael Brooks, Alexandra Chang, Gordon Cook, Kelley Dai, Krystin Dehaven, Jai Dhyai, Beth Holzman, Meaghan Jennison, Lisa Ji, Rebecca Kahn, Pin-Yi Ko, Ira Kowler, Diana Le, Amy Lieberman, Qais Mohammad, Alyssa Nadel, Eric Schoeffler, Ibraham Sharifzada, Hang Shu, Steven Siegel, Di Sun, Xiyin Tang, Chen Yan, Chao Yang

Northwest: Matthew McAllister, Nabanita Pal

Paint Branch: Kathryn Anderson, Ruben Lachica, Sandeep Soman, Alan Uy, Jonathan Zepp

Quince Orchard: Jennifer Ho, Aakash Mathur, Arden Moscati, Kathryn Purdy, Rajiv Sharma

Rockville: Benjamin Solomon

Seneca Valley: Jason George

Springbrook: Ryan Gomez

Walt Whitman: Bettina Burgett, Hiten Chawla, Raman Gupta, Scott Kominers, Adam Singerman, Eric Wang

Thomas S. Wootton: Daniel Baron, Polina Belyantseva, Keri Berman, Grace Chang, David Chen, Kaixi Chen, Angela Fan, Philip Hewes, John Hooff, Calvin Hsu, Alex Israel, Kirill Kustov, Eric Liang, Zhimei Luo, Laura Onken, Andrew Sun, Andrew Ward, Yunoing Wang, Youkuan Yan, Yao Yue, Zhiyuan Zhang

The College Board honored a total of 3,387 MCPS graduates and current students, including the National AP Scholars, for outstanding performance on the 2005 exams, an increase of 323 students over last year.

In other honored categories, 1,195 students were designated AP Scholars with Distinction for earning an average grade of at least 3.5 on all AP exams taken and 3 or higher on five or more exams; 781 were designated AP Scholars with Honor for earning an average grade of at least 3.5 on all AP exams taken and grades of 3 or higher on four or more exams; and 1,411 were named AP Scholars for earning grades of 3 or higher on three or more AP exams.