<p>As promised, my vent. I am considering sending this to NM board too. Ilfather suggested I place this on another website too where I could collect additional signatures. If you have an interest in doing so, let me know and I will look into the logistics of doing so. Happy Press release date. My timing BTW on posting this had nothing to do with the press release date. </p>
<p>One, this process takes too long, and two, the National Merit Board needs to be more transparent. Regarding first issue, kids took the PSAT in October of 2012. Why does it take 11 months to figure out who is a semi-finalist? I understand NM board wants to use 2013 graduation data in running the numbers so I respect we won’t have answers until the class of 2013 graduates. However, when I was in school, national merit semi-finalists were announced in September. Technology has exploded since then. So assuming a gap between June and September was necessary back in my day, that is no longer the case. Numbers could have been crunched as soon as NM had the high school data and semi-finalists could be announced by July or August. As others have pointed out, put the darn info out on college board or something, so the information could be accessed by the families while high schools are not in session. </p>
<p>Second, more transparency is needed. Thanks to college confidential, we had links to access the state data as soon as it was available, which I think was either late January or in February. What was missing were percentages that went along with the selection index score. Had I been able to determine that say 600 kids at a minimum likely scored higher than my kid in our state, I would have gone oh, crap back in February and spent the last several months focusing more on competitive scholarships. What we were given in February was the breakdown for each subsection but no selection index. Although we all (and by all I mean by CC comrades) figured out the scores would be higher, I think most of us are surprised by how huge the jumps are this year when compared with previous years. Since we had no good way of narrowing down my kid’s odds as to which side of the fence they fell on, not only did we have the already daunting task of narrowing colleges down, our family ran 2 lists, the what if kiddo makes NMSF list, and what if they don’t. Part of this narrowing included what turned out to be unnecessary research into schools with generous national merit scholarships and for us, the time in hindsight would have been better spent focusing on competitive scholarships with maybe a glossed over look at the NM schools just in case kid made it. For those who ask, why did we even bother researching schools until we knew for sure, see my first point. September of a kid’s senior year is too late to begin a frantic process of deciding which school to go to. We all have kids who have partial and if we are lucky, full scholarship options regardless of NM status. Many competitive scholarships have deadlines between October and early December and even schools with rolling admissions ,the general consensus is apply sooner rather than later to maximize scholarship options. Our kids are busy enough this semester without adding NM paperwork that has a much shorter turnaround than the 11 months we had to wait and for those who are just starting NM scholarship research, good luck. You and your kid only have a short window to get a lot done.</p>