Freshman PSAT score

xa3
Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:49:05 +0000

yes it is a really good score for a freshman. i got ~150 my freshman year, and you only really need a score of around 220 to meet national merit. plus, colleges never see your psat score, only the “National Merit Scholar (Finalist/Semi Finalist)” in your application. getting a 240 is not impossible cus one of my friends just got that score :)
I think the best way to prepare is to borrow or buy a psat prep book and go through the whole thing. target especially your vocab, like the one for completing the sentence. Knowing those words early will be better than cramming them your junior year when the psat really counts. the vocab will also help a lot in the passages because it’s those words that sometimes throws people off. For math, use the barrons SAT math workbook. it focuses only on the math section and goes into sooo much detail, resulting in higher math scores haha. Plus its harder than whats on the real psat, so it will help a lot. I went through the book, once the over the summer and another time 1 month before the psat. i got a 80/80 on the math section. for writing, im going to recommend another barrons book (cus barrons makes the best books). get the barrons writing workbook for the new SAT. skip the writing the essay part cus thats not on the psat, but go over the grammar and everything else in the book. I used a total of 3 books, psat book, SAT math, and SAT writing (all barrons books) the 6 months before my junior year psat and got the national merit a big step from my abysmal 150
Uhh 235 is pretty hard, and like i said in #1, colleges never see your psat score, they only see that you made national merit. just google your state’s cut off from the previous years’ psat scores and set your goal score 5 points above to be safe.
Well, getting the national merit IS a pretty prestigious award, and I think it will definitely help. However, only junior year counts.
I’m guessing that math is one of the easier subjects to get an 80 on, cus there is always a straight forward answer, unlike CR which is subjective. But probably not a lot of frosh get 80.