Brevard Middle School student James Thompson, was honored by Duke University during the Grand Recognition Ceremony at the Cameron Indoor Stadium for his extraordinary scores on the American College Testing (ACT) placement test.
Thompson took his state mandated grade level achievement test in December, and as part Duke University’s Talent Identification Program, the “7th Grade Talent Search” identified those students and invited them to take college entrance exams to learn more about their abilities. The grand recognition ceremony honors seventh graders who have earned scores equal to or better than 90 percent of college-bound seniors who took the same tests. This year, of the 64,896 national participants, 21,775 students have been invited to attend the state recognition ceremony and 1,894 students have been invited to the grand recognition ceremony. Duke provides opportunities for these students down the road.
Thompson excelled in reading, placing in the 99th percentile, and placed in the 60th percentile for mathematics.
“He loves math, he loves to create formulas, and he’s very articulate,” said his mother, Lisa Thompson. “We’ve always read a lot in our house. We all read, but we also just talk a lot as a family, so I think that helped him develop that comprehension. We recognized when he was little that he just spoke really well and in complete sentences, so we’ve always treated him like that.
I remember one time he had a little block in his hand, and someone asked him about the block, and at age three he responded “actually it’s a cylinder,” and we both just thought “where did he get it from?”
When Thompson grows up, he said he “wants to be a computer programmer, an astronomer or astrophysicist or mathematician or maybe a cosmologist.” That may be sooner than later. He and his parents are discussing home schooling and online courses so he can graduate early.
Thompson said he spends most of his free time teaching himself computer programming and has taken a few online classes already in computer programming, he also gets Discover and Popular Science magazines.
Of the test itself, he said he was nervous initially, but in the end it wasn’t that difficult.
“I was especially worried about the math test, my knowledge base wasn’t high enough. I didn’t know what some of the symbols represented. It was kind of nerve racking being in a room with a bunch of high school seniors, but there was one other student in my grade and that made me less self-conscious of being different,” said Thompson.
