On SAT, 2 aces in the family

Perfection repeats itself in the Bergquist family.

Forty years ago, Dwight Bergquist, then 17 and attending high school in Connecticut, achieved a perfect score on the mathematics portion of the SAT.

His son Taylor, 17, a senior at Newport Harbor High School, recently found out that he too had scored a perfect 800 on the SAT’s math section.

The news that the father-and-son combination had pulled off a double 800 spanning four decades shocked both generations of math whizzes.

“Taylor didn’t know his dad got a perfect score,” said Taylor’s mother, Gretchen. “He was so amazed. He’s just stoked that he and his dad both did this.”

As was Gretchen.

“I was just overwhelmed,” she said. “I’m just so proud of him, and I felt it was so special for both the father and the son.”

Only 10,052 test takers out of more than 1.5 million college-bound seniors who took the test this year scored 800 in mathematics on the SAT, according to a report by the College Board, which oversees the nationwide college admissions assessment test.

After the family got the news, Gretchen Bergquist spent three hours rummaging through boxes in the garage before she found what she was looking for: a 1969 newspaper clipping from the Hartford Courant. Photographed in black and white is a young Dwight being congratulated for his scholastic feat.

“Officials say it marks the first time in the history of Enfield High that a student chalked up a perfect score,” the caption reads.

Dwight Bergquist went on to attend UCLA medical school and became a physician. With his Bruin dad’s blessing, Taylor hopes to attend USC next fall, and perhaps follow the elder Bergquist as well in studying medicine. A member of Newport Harbor’s math-and-science-focused Da Vinci Academy, Taylor spent six months being mentored by a plastic surgeon and observing surgeries at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian.

“He’s always been a math and science kid,” Gretchen Bergquist said. “He’s very high in math at school.”

Taylor also loves water sports and snowboarding.

His mother credited both her son’s genes and his teachers to his achievements.

“School’s such an important thing in our family,” she said. “He obviously got some smarts from his dad, if he got a perfect math score. It definitely didn’t come from me,” she laughed.

Dwight and Gretchen’s younger son, Austin, is a sophomore at Newport Harbor. The straight-A student, who’s already studying calculus, is feeling the squeeze a little, his mother said.

“The pressure’s on you, kid,” she joked. “But I would not be surprised if he did very well.”