The state cutoffs are unfair, but at least there is a good justification for them. The program is trying to find top students, which is not exactly the same thing as the highest achieving students, and it recognizes that top students in many areas don’t have access to outstanding educational opportunities and so won’t perform quite as well as those who do.
But there’s no good reason to muddy the scoring achieved by as much as 3 questions when you are drawing a very important line between 7 wrong and 8 wrong. There will be many cases where students who answered more questions correctly miss getting the scholarship while students who missed one or two more questions will make it, depending on whether they got lucky or unlucky with this score chart. Why should this be? Getting the necessary scores is already way too dependent on speed and accuracy rather than what the student knows. There’s no need to put additional arbitrary lines and luck into this process.