<p>BB: I hope it isn’t a violation of federal privacy laws to reward students for doing well. Since the awarded scores are a combination of results from differents tests it is a bit nebulous what students did how well on what. It in no way tells anyone who did not do well it just tells us about who did do well enough to meet this cutoff and I suppose if you look at the flip side who did not do well enough to meet the cutoff. But is that really so unlike naming students for National Merit recognition? As it turned out about 5% of the class received the top award and about 15% earned an award of some sort. These students don’t necessarily correspond with those in the top 5 or 15% of the class. Unless we assume that anyone not in this 15% did poorly we really don’t know all that much about those who weren’t awarded except that their combined score was not this magic number.</p>