@pickmen, no what I am saying is that NMSC couldn’t care less with CB’s percentile distribution. They are simply trying to pick top 50K students from the descending order of SI starting with 228 to wherever the commended cutoff lands up being. The projections made by experts show this is at 210 which may also imply that every state will have it’s SF cutoff >= the commended SI cutoff. Whether or not this aligns with 97% percentile on the CB’s charts or not is not material to them. Hopefully when CB does publish its percentiles with actual PSAT test takers among juniors, NMSC’s selections for commended students will align with top ~3% of juniors. I hate to think what happens when a state’s SF cutoff lands up being lower than the commended SI projection, but top 50K is already allocated at levels higher than a state’s SF cutoff! Perhaps they may have SF among certain states that don’t quite meet the criterion to be commended nationally!
Those replies are bizarrely inconsistent. SInce they appear to be thinking of altering scores for only 1 state, I am going to stop even paying attention. Our dd’s score is 8 points higher than the historical high and +4 for their Jan 8th predictions, so we are just going to move forward and ignorantly assume she has made the cut. (Now to get a corresponding SAT score.)
The comments section of testmasters raises many questions…mainly, who are these students that are capable of scoring well on the psat but yet are incapable of reading the testmaster table to determine if their 217 is good enough?
@replyback, I’m not so sure. There’s another response out there of theirs where they say 206 should make commended. 202 and 210 are not easy digital typos to make and the response references the percentile tables, which means they know there’s a big issue between the concordance and percentile tables, although they have been blithely stating they are inflated based on national %s but they must know at the 99% national and user do not differ much.
@OHToCollege I agree 100%. It’s not a NMSC problem. As I’ve said it’s a CB problem because they have been misleading in their reporting of percentiles and I think many parents and kids have felt they’ve been led up the proverbial garden path as a result of this.
My son’s SI is 207 and both his overall national and user percentile both state 99th percentile. He is a junior. It would be very sad for him to think he scored in 99th percentile if that isn’t true. It would also be a shame to receive a report like this and not even get commended. These kids are working very hard to do well on these exams and basically the message is that the 99th percentile is not good enough … go figure! And if these percentiles are that far off from reality, then shame on the CB for either intentionally or not misrepresenting the facts!
Today at 2:06 pm, Bill wrote, “We recently obtained a very large pool of data, and we expect to actually release an updated projection for a specific state in the next couple of days. Although we were initially skeptical, extrapolation using our new data set does seem to confirm that a 205 would be consistent with scoring in the 99th percentile. That said, we will not be updating this table again, only providing a specific estimate for a specific state.”
What’s going on???
@Speedy2019 @CA1543 @suzyQ7 @DoyleB Some more information. As a reminder, we have averaged 10 to 12 NMSF over the past few years. At 219, we would have 5. At 214, we would have 10. At 210, we would have 20.
son got a 220 si in florida.chances good fo smf?so much going on here,just trying to get an idea.
which state?
@knilla my point exactly. I cannot understand how CB could do this. I see it as a big PR problem for them. They have all the data. They do this for a living. They have to know that most people know the difference between 99% and 97%.
"Today at 2:06 pm, Bill wrote, “We recently obtained a very large pool of data, and we expect to actually release an updated projection for a specific state in the next couple of days. Although we were initially skeptical, extrapolation using our new data set does seem to confirm that a 205 would be consistent with scoring in the 99th percentile. That said, we will not be updating this table again, only providing a specific estimate for a specific state.”
Ok now we’ve truly reached bizarro land. “We have a lot of data, but won’t update our charts. We’re just going to leave two, widely divergent estimates up there. You can pick the one you like the best.”
I like this testmasters response:
Carol says:
January 9, 2016 at 5:31 pm
I am curious if you are estimating what the cutoff could be for commended status. We are in Texas and wondering what it might take to get commended.
Reply
Michael says:
February 4, 2016 at 2:10 pm
Hi Carol, we’re estimating a 210 officially, but based on our model’s construction, we think Commended might be anywhere from a 200-210.
I like that answer 200-210. Boy, that narrows it down. The whole world is guessing 200-210 for commended.
But 210 means concordance tables are correct and 200 means SI % table is correct !!!
@AJ2017 I can see FL making some gains on the PSAT, especially since the PSAT test takers is a more select group, but I see no evidence that FL will jump up to CT levels, The question is who will be closer to 215, FL or CT? Either way, I think there is a flaw in Testmasters approach if they project both at 215.
@DoyleB They said they would release new projections last night (I assume for many states because they advised people from different states to check back). Now it will be only for one state, in a few days. They raised TX from 217 to 219, and kept commend at 210. Now 205 is 99th percentile.
@mphill1tx So far I’ve used a rule of thumb that schools with a fair number of NMSFs can change plus/minus 50% in a year. So I’d say your anecdote supports a new cutoff of 212 through 219. I don’t think we can be more specific than that, and I don’t think we can say any number in that range is more likely than any other.
Truly strange info coming from Testmasters…
I definitely agree. Florida’s cut off will not approach CT. I also agree with the other posters. Testmaster’s predictions seem all over the place. I think many of the posters here seem to have given the cut offs more thought. I wish testmasters would hand over their data to you all so you guys could figure it out.
@mphill1tx, great data. Anecdote suggests a 214 for Texas! This is the exact anecdote I said was an example of SF numbers going down to my good friends @suzyQ7 and @DoyleB.
@AJ2017 I think that CT 215 data is a transfer error from previous row - Colorado 2015.