WATERTOWN, New York (WWNY) – Sitting in her English classroom, Liesel Barkei will tell you she doesn’t feel perfect.
But the Immaculate Heart Central student is wrong, at least when it comes to the English Advanced Placement exam, given to some high school students each spring.
Barkei was one of only 11 students world-wide, out of nearly half a million who took the test, to get everything – every essay, every multiple choice, every everything – completely right.
“I thought I messed up,” she told a reporter Wednesday.
“I thought my essays were kind of weak.”
Barkei thought she did ok. She uses the word ‘passable.’ Then, one day in October, her mother picked her up at school.
“I got in the car, my mom told me the school called, and the College Board called them, and then she told me. I was pretty surprised, for sure.”
Jillian Norris, Barkei’s English teacher at IHC, preps her students for “the next level.”
“It’s all about ‘are they ready for college,’ do they have the skills to move on and do what they need to do. It’s not something that you think about, can they get an absolutely perfect score,” she said Wednesday.
So like everyone else, she was surprised, but only because of the nature of the test – “the test is so difficult, and some of the questions have so much variation in how you can answer them” – and not because of Barkei.
The way Norris puts it, Barkei has an “editor’s mind,” the right sort of mind for getting everything right, “a brain for just picking things apart, and really looking at layers of meaning, and I think that’s what she did on the test.”
As for Barkei, she likes English and expects to study it going forward. But she’s really excited by art, by drawing.
“Art is something that I have a lot more that I want to learn about. It makes me excited that I don’t know enough to be at the level I want to be at,” she said.
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