Also, from someone’s eyeballing of the graph, here is a map from “ultimate TX NMSF cutoff” to “number of NMSF from this group of students”:
SI # Cumulative
227 2 2
226 5 7
225 6 13
224 8 21
223 3 24
222 8 32
221 7 39
220 13 52
219 7 59
218 14 73
217 10 83
216 13 96
215 12 108
214 13 121
213 9 130
212 12 142
IOW, if the cutoff ends up being 215, their picture seems to imply there will be 108 NMSF from this school district.
@wildcat1915 The confirming SAT score is not known at this time, and won’t be known until Sept. I called the national merit board last week. Previous cutoff was 1960 on the old SAT.
@bucketDad (#3175) I found a link about HISD’s PSAT camp with Testmasters but it’s back in July 2014, so I wondered if HISD had the same camp in July 2015 with Testmasters…haven’t been able to find a similar link for 2015.
@SLparent. Yes, that’s the article I was referring to. The article says they invite 200+ students for three weeks of PSAT prep based on PSAT scores from 10th grade. So they are prepping the cream of the crop. If this program was particularly successful in 2015 (or even just larger) as compared to 2014, that might explain the results that Testmasters reported.
I live in northern VA. I think the schools are generally good. Academic pressure is constant. I’m not aware of any publicly funded PSAT prep programs here. This HISD program strikes me as unusual. Perhaps I don’t get out enough.
At my Ds school they offered a PSAT prep class period (1.5 hours every other day during the Fall semester). To get an invite to join the class, students had to have scored well on their 10th grade PSAT. They even offered it as pass/fail so that it wouldn’t drag down their GPAs as a non-AP class. I think all of the high schools in our district offered a similar class. We live in a suburb of Austin.
Wow…my DD HS barely promotes the PSAT and definitely does nothing like a prep class. I got my daughter a prep book which she touched only the week before. She did fine, but bummer for those kids who could have excelled with a little study had they known the potential benefitm
@bucketDad @TxMum2 @slaudsmom I know of a Mississippi high school that has a PSAT prep class that meets for a full class period for a year. It’s open to kids with test scores in the 90th or better percentile. It starts in January. After the PSAT is given in October they switch to ACT prep. The high school generally has 20 to 25 NMSF every year out of about 400 seniors, so that’s up to six percent of the class.
My son’s high school has some great students but refuses to do anything for them.
@bucketDad Actually, besides HISD, I know of 2 other school districts in Houston suburbs that offered subsidized PSAT/SAT courses for kids that met PSAT criteria. They use the kids’ sophomore PSAT scores to determine if they are part of the program. The school districts would pay for a major of the cost with the test prep. company. I think this explains why TX has such a disparity in PSAT scores.
@SLparent Are those programs relatively recent?
@bucketDad I wish I knew the answer to this.
I don’t see why TestMasters would exclude their own 200+ students from the HISD data. Their own cutoff estimate is based on historical nominations of SF from the HISD. If they are trying to improve the number of national merit scholars in that school district, I can easily imagine a lower cutoff at say 218 which would give them 73 SF as opposed to 59 at 219 SI (with historical norm being ~60 from HISD). At 217 (a stretch), they get 83 nominees. Certainly plausible, at a cost to other school districts in TX who should then have fewer SF.
I would bet the horse at >=218 SI, given their data for HISD and their own prep students in the sample.
Big news! NHRP cutoffs are available by phone and it looks like they are 5 points higher than previous years. The highest NHRP cutoff is usually a few points below commended. What this says for NMSF hopefuls is that cut-offs will be higher than in previous years instead of lower as some suspected.
@nw2this What do you mean available by phone? How do you get that? And is this for class 2017? Higher in what way? The score scale was changed for Oct 2015 test so how do you compare to Oct 2014 cutoffs?
@nw2this…not really sure how Texas NMSF can be higher than 220 out of 228.
Yes, for the class of 2017
Someone posted about it on the Hispanic board and another parent confirmed it by pm.
Contact NHRP
Email NHRP (NHRP@scholarshipamerica.org) or call 866-545-8467
The 2016 cutoff for NHRP southern region was 199, the 2017 cutoff is 204.
The 2016 commended cutoff was around 202.
So, we can’t say how much higher NMSF cutoffs will be, but I think we can be confident that they will be higher.
That does not indicate a higher NMSF cut-off, imo.
@nw2this Thanks! Interesting that they have the cutoff for NHRP class of 2017 but they don’t have commended. Actually, they have it but chose not to publish it.
This supports the scale compression, where lower cuts move up, and higher cuts move down, with a tighter range across the board.
I just called and for Texas last year was 182 - this year it’s 191 for NHRP
I just called NMSC and they said they have nothing to do with the NHRP. Two totally separate organizations!!! The gentleman at NMSC told me that just because the NHRP score went up does not mean that the NMSF scores will go up or down.