Time management is important, says Dhara Patel.

By Deepak Chitnis

WASHINGTON, DC: Florida teenager Dhara Patel has made local history by attaining the highest Grade Point Average (GPA) ever in her high school: an astronomically high 10.03.

Patel is currently a graduating senior at Plant City High School, located in central Florida, where she has spent the last four years taking just about every class, rudimentary and advanced, that her school offers. By getting As in all but one of the classes she’s taken over the last four years, she has secured an incredible 10.03 GPA.

Consider this: on the most basic grading scale, which is what Plant City High School apparently subscribes to, the GPAs are calculated out of 4.0. Remember when 4.0 was the highest GPA a high school student could attain? Well now, thanks to Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, honors, and dual-enrollment classes, students have the ability to far surpass that.

Counties generally give out GPAs higher than 4.0 if a student takes an Advanced Placement or similar class. For example, an A in normal history would get you a 4.0, but an A in AP history could get you a 4.5 or a 5.0. For someone like Dhara Patel, who took an incredibly 17 AP and dual-enrollment classes in high school and aced them, 10.03 became a feasible goal.

Speaking to the Tampa Tribune, Patel said that she never really set a goal of attaining such a high GPA, but just kept plugging away at her schoolwork. Time management, she says, was the most critical factor to her stunning academic success.

In fact, Patel has so many college-level credits to her name, that she already has enough to earn her an Associate’s degree – and she hasn’t even graduated from high school yet. Her performance in high school was so good, the only B she ever got was in a history class she took from local Hillborough Community College; all her other grades in high school were As.

Patel took night classes, online classes, and even summer classes for four years, in addition to her normal high school curriculum. For her effort, Patel is the valedictorian of her graduating class, beating out her older brother Parthik who was the salutatorian of his graduating class in 2012. Patel’s graduation was today; now she gets to enjoy her summer before starting college in the fall.

And where does someone who earned a 10.03 in high school go for college? The University of Florida, where she aims to major in microbiology. Her ultimate goal, she says, is to become an orthodontist.