NORWICH – For decades, home-schooling has been a controversial issue in education, with advocates citing the benefits of a customized curriculum and its lower cost per student, while opponents point out the absence of social interaction and a potential lack of academic standards.

For 16-year-old Luke Shaver, the experience has been an extremely positive one and – academically speaking – he’s set the bar pretty high.

Currently in the third quarter of his fifth year as a home-schooled student, Shaver recently discovered he’d scored higher than 95 percent of college-bound high school juniors nationwide on his PSAT exam in October. On the exam’s writing section, he scored higher than 98 percent of American juniors, with a total score of 196 out of a possible 240.

To say he was surprised is an understatement, according to his parents.

“It’s all God’s doing,” said Shaver’s mother Jude, who teaches her eldest son, his ten-year-old brother and 13-year-old sister from the Shaver Home Actively Revealing Providence Academy in their Brown Avenue home. “Luke’s always been gifted academically and from God. It’s what we felt led to do and it’s a unique way for siblings to gel, they’re interacting all the time.”