Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated the number of years School Counselor Joe Michaud has worked at Jefferson High School. His career has spanned 23 years, seven of which have been at Jefferson High. The story has been updated.
Ninety-seven percent is an excellent test score, but it wasn’t quite good enough for Jefferson High senior Abram Williams: After scoring 35 out of 36 possible points on the ACT as a junior, he aced the test last fall with a perfect 36.
The ACT is a standardized college admissions test used as “a benchmark for all of the different disciplines: math, reading, science, writing,” according to Jefferson High School Counselor Joe Michaud. He said that juniors at the school, where grades are about 65 students each, automatically take the test, and that students can elect to take the test again if they choose. Scoring 30 or higher “is really considered elite,” he said, noting that “You see a lot of colleges using the ACT even over grades.”
But in his 23-year career, the past seven of which have been at JHS, he’d never seen a perfect 36—a score he said only about three out of every 1,000 students achieves—until now.
“The state average kind of hovers around 20. The national average is a little below that, maybe 19,” Michaud said. “He took it as a junior and got a 35, and he retook it in the fall and scored a perfect 36.”
Michaud said he thought Williams would be satisfied with his initial score of 35—about 97% of the possible points—after taking the test the first time, because “that will pretty much write your ticket to any university in the world.” But, he said, “I think he’s just after it. That was his goal, he wanted to be the best of the best.”
Williams, joining Michaud for an interview in Michaud’s office last week, was humble but honest about his ambitions for the test, noting that “there’s really not much difference between a 35 and a 36. But I still thought I could do better.”
As the third of five siblings from Clancy—all of whom have, do or will attend JHS—a bit of sibling rivalry probably didn’t hurt, either.
“He had two older brothers who did pretty well on the ACT and I think he just wanted to beat them,” Amy Williams, Abram’s mother, a secretary at the school, said jokingly in a phone call, before reiterating that her son’s primary motivation to score a perfect 36 seemed to be simply to do it for himself, just to see if he could. Abram’s cousin, also a senior at JHS, scored a 35, she said. “There are some smart cookies in this class.”
Michaud made a similar observation, noting at least five ACT scores higher than 30 among this year’s seniors—the most he’s seen so far. And Williams, 17, was the first to point out that he wasn’t the only one to record an elite score.
But he was the only one to record a perfect score, even though he, by his own account, didn’t study as much as he should have.
“I felt fairly confident about most of it. Math and science I was real confident. Reading and English I was less confident about,” he said. “I didn’t study very much between the [tests], definitely not as much as I should have.”
Though he said he should have studied more, he did have some help preparing for the test. Amy Williams said that when her husband Kevin, Abram’s father, was deployed with his Army National Guard unit to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from October 2020 to July 2021, Abram received an educational grant from Our Military Kids, an organization that supports children of deployed National Guard members. He chose to take a monthslong online ACT prep course.
Kevin had been back home for a few months by the time Abram took the ACT a second time, sitting for about five hours at Carroll College in Helena last September to complete the exam. He felt “pretty good” the second time, he said, chalking it up to experience.
A few weeks later, he received an online notification of his result: 36 out of 36.
“I was sitting in my room and opened it up. I almost just yelled, but then I decided to surprise my dad with it because he was home at the time,” Williams said. “I told him, ‘I got this weird email, I think you should look at it.’ It took him a little bit to register.”
He showed his mom when she got home.
“I guess I fully expected him do it, by that time, so it wasn’t a surprise. I felt really happy for him,” Amy Williams said. “Mostly I felt really proud of him that he had this goal that he worked really hard to meet. That was impressive to me.”
Outside of academic pursuits, Abram Williams chases other goals, primarily athletics. He played varsity football for the Panthers and he runs track. In his free time, he said, he’s lifting weights. Balancing it all isn’t too hard, he said, because “I have more spare time than I think most of the time.”
So what comes next? Likely college, but he’s not sure where. He is leaning toward studying physics or chemistry wherever he ends up.
“I think it’s pretty neat that it’s the basics of the universe and there’s so much to know about it, too. It’s pretty cool to know what’s going on at the smaller scale,” he said. “I’d like to stay local, I really like it in Montana. But I’d also like to have an adventure, try something new. It’s kind of all up in the air right now.”
