The people who I admire most

(Grammar Questions I Couldn't Answer)

This is an extension of my "the+superlative" post, and perhaps may have already been answered by Stephan's comment.  But I'll post it here anyway.

When doing feedback on student writing, I highlighted the sentence: "The persons who I admire most in my life, there are my parents."

I had the obvious grammar errors in mind.  But, as always, the students picked up on a bunch of things that I wasn't even intending.

The students thought that "most" should be "the most" because the superlative form is usually accompanied by the article "the".

To me, my native speaker intuition was telling me that "the people who I admire the most"  and "the people who I admire most" both sounded correct.