A Naperville North student was the only student in the world to earn a perfect score on last year’s AP Physics exam.

Jason Xia, now a junior at Naperville North, took the exam in May of his sophomore year, only to find out recently that he was the lone perfect score out of  170,144 other students who took it last year.

“My first reaction was being pretty surprised because I saw online that only one person had gotten a perfect score in July, but I didn’t know it was me until last week,” said Xia.

Xia was not the only one surprised by the results. Mark Rowzee, Xia’s Physics teacher in the second semester last year, could not recall a student of his achieving this level of success on a test of this magnitude.

“We have some students score near perfect or perfect scores on state competition-type exams, but probably nothing of that magnitude,” said Rowzee.

The news was first broken October 26th on CUSD 203’s official Twitter page. Perhaps making the feat more impressive, the AP Physics exam was redesigned just a few short years ago in order to make it more rigorous for the test takers, bringing the overall national scores down. Of course, this did not slow Xia down.

“Obviously Jason was able to cope with that (change in rigor) very readily. I’m pretty sure he would have done well on the old style of exam, or the new style of exam,” said Rowzee.

Kevin Farrell, Xia’s first-semester teacher in Physics last year, echoed Rowzee’s words in regards to Jason’s success.

“We’ve had really good students who do really good things, but no one’s ever had a perfect, I don’t believe, on an AP Exam,” said Farrell, who also has Xia in a calculus-based Physics class this year and works with him as a member of the Science Bowl team. “If he did get something wrong, he wanted to make sure why. It really bothered him. He  was pretty much perfect on all of his exams.”

When asked for his keys to success, Jason encouraged students to seek help early on if they are struggling.

“If you have even a small misunderstanding, you should get it figured out immediately because small misunderstandings snowball in physics. By May you might be in a big hole,” said Xia.

Editors Note: A previous version of this story implied that the student’s last name was spelled Xai, when in fact, it was spelled Xia.