OK Sure- Everyone - Here is how NMS people come up with Commended and Semi Finalists (Hint: They do NOT use concordance, they do NOT use percentiles:)
They create an excel spreadsheet with 1.6 million students listed in rows with their Selection Index score listed in columnn B. Sort by SI, highest to lowest. When they hit about row number 50,000 (up or down a few rows so that all students of the same SI are covered) they look at that column B and say “Commended cutoff = That number”! Yeah. We have commended.
Then for Semifinalist, they calculate out a % allocation of SF’s based on number of high school seniors in each state, and 16,000 (which is the number of students they need for SF). Likely very close to the numbers from last year which can be found here: http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf. Then they take that excel spreadsheet and break it up by state and sort until they get as close as they can to the number of students they are supposed to allocate to that state - and presto. They have state cutoffs.
All the college board math that we are trying to extrapolate info for is not important for NMF. Only for parents who are trying to figure out if their kid is going to make $$$ in this contest.