@JAMCAFE, excellent.
@dallaspiano, any chance you could ask your contacts at KY GSP explicitly if 211 SI represents 99%tile (at or below definition) nationally?
Same is true in NY - lots of private and some outstanding public schools but a large number of students who are administered the PSAT but who are not on track to be college ready.
Mean/mode is a poor predictor of NMSF potentials. In OH, only 10% or so of total high schools even report a SF. Vast majority of schools likely hover around and contribute to peak in somewhat of a normally distributed curve of SIās.
Same is true in here in California. Very wide range between some of the Silicon Valley and Pasadena/JPL high-achieving public schools and low-achieving schools in parts of Los Angeles and other places. The mean can be quite low even if the cutoff is high.
Mean could possibly be somewhat predictive in more homogeneous states.
@OHToCollege,
A KY Mom contacted GSP program on 2/18/2016 and 211 was confirmed and it was confirmed in the 99 range but she did not push for more in details (99 or 99+). 211 was considered national (11th).
@thshadow explained, KY residents can submit a min 34 ACT or a min 2260 old SAT or a min 211 new PSAT to get 10 pts considerations for their scholarship program.
Hint: she has seen our posts and I just leave it to her to decide her annoucement
I posted this a while back, but the South region Hispanic cutoff is typically in the low 96th percentile, and this year it is 204. So I think weāve got a good idea that Commended is going to be 206 or 207. Everything is super-clumpy from there. Instead of having four or five scores per percentile, there are like two. So the 98th percentile might be only 209 and 210, which makes 211 the 99th percentile.
Establishing state cutoffs is going to be a messy business.
@dallaspiano As the DC person on the thread . . . Yes, the District has the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich in the same city. We also donāt have the surrounding suburbs and rural areas that tend to fill in the center of the curve in other places. But to make things more extreme, most of the top private schools in the greater metro area are in the city itself. Schools like Sidwell Friends, Gonzaga, and Georgetown Day all attract students from the larger region. Six of the ten wealthiest counties in the country are counties in the DC region. Those well-off students often end up at private schools in DC. Most of those private schools have half or less of their students coming from the District. Last year only 4 of 44 NMSF students came from public schools. The rest were from the expensive privates. Iāve seen years where none of our NMSF students come from public schools. To be fair, there are a couple of decent public schools that tend to turn out one or two NMSF students every year, but I would guess that half or fewer of DCās NMSF students actually live in the District.
@EarlVanDorn, why you conclude the National Commended level at 206-207 by just basing on NHRP South cut off at 204. How about NHRP cut off Southwest (region 3) at 191 this years? Is there any relationship between NHRP and NM Commended ( i mean scores), if they do, how do you make connection between the two?
Right or wrong? Nobody can tell you now. All, have to wait until Apr or Septā¦
About 211, it is in 99th range as listed 2015 PSAT data table
Thank you @candjsdad for inside DC info
What do you all think about a 213 from WI?
@eyrar99 - WI was 208 last year so it would seem with all of the predictions a 213 is in the clear but nobody can know for sure. Do you have any anecdotal information from WI? Without real numbers itās anyoneās guess.
I havenāt been keeping up with this thread. Any chance for a 217 in California? Probably not, I knowā¦
@dsi411 - my daughter also has a 217 in CA. Unfortunately, thatās probably not good enough. Best guess from me at least is that CA will be 219 or 220. Of course, no one can be certain of anything.
@EarlVanDorn - does anyone know if Hispanics in general did poorly on the old vocabulary section? Itās certainly possible that the new test is less biased against Hispanics, which would mean that their scores are higher, and that the Hispanic cutoff would then correspond to a higher percentile. It still remains to be seen.
At this point, I think the safest bet for anything related to the new PSAT is that itās the same as last year. Plus or minus a couple of points. But probably not too much. So, Iād guess that the commended score will still be in the 202 range.
If language was a potential barrier for the old reading section, the new math section will more than compensate for any improvements there. Unless the only barrier was the more obscure language of the vocabulary sections, in which case most poor performing school students were at a similar disadvantage.
Itās hard to say if the Testmasterās HISD sample of 8551 students is representative of entire state of TX. But say if you did, 99% (at or below) percentile of TX juniors would be between 216-217 SI, substantially off compared with national 211 indicated in KY GSP program. The other thing could be that 99%tile in TX isnāt nationally representative, which we know is entirely possible due to much higher SI cutoff for TX relative to average.
If we were to assume HISD is at a minimum representative of TX students, the interesting thing is that to allocate ~1353 SF out of say ~220,000 junior test takers (escalated from 199K in 2014 program using 1.7M/1.47M test taker ratio), gives us 53 SF in HISD. That corresponds to an SI of 220, which is only an SI more than Testmasterās predicted 219.
With assumption every 8551 TX juniors we have 53 NMSF qualifiers and we have 1363 (NMSF qualifiers) for 220,000 TX test takers ===> lead to SI 220 TX cut off (with TestMasters data) ==> questionable TestMasters data results
A quick check, ISDs at East and South Dallas have very minimum NMSF qualifiers even they have more than 20K juniors (many schools have none, or lucky to have 1)
North TX has about 540+ NMSFs last years, most go to well-to-do ISD or selective TAMS or selective rich private schools. This is no anecdotes, it is a reality in TX
Linear interpretation does not work from 8551 to 220000
@PAMom21 - I think itās more the latter. The math section has lots more words, and you need to be able to sort out whatās important and whatās not - but I doubt that a native English speaker would have much of an advantage over an almost-native speaker (and kids near the Hispanic threshold are not kids that are struggling with English). Whereas on the vocabulary, itās easy to imagine that the more English youāre exposed to, the more likely you are to do well on it.
Plus, I believe I read somewhere that CB explicitly stated that they removed the vocabulary section because of its biasesā¦
Natives or non-natives have advantage in NMSF???
this was posted on 9/11/2014 by GMTplus7
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/national-merit-scholarships/1684991-interesting-demographic-glimpse-of-california-national-merit-semifinalists-p1.html
@thshadow My personal opinion is that if Hispanics are smart enough and know English well enough to do very well on the PSAT, vocabulary really isnāt going to be too much of a problem. I donāt think the changes are going to make much difference. A lot depends on where people go to school, not so much the quality of the school, but the quality of the competition.
@dallaspiano Iām guesstimating the Commended score at 207 or 208 based on the fact that last year the Hispanic South region cutoff score was in the lower end of the 96th percentile, and these percentiles tend to remain constant. If you adjust the Selection Index percentile chart provided by the College Board so that a score of 204 (this yearās South Hispanic cutoff) is equal to the the low 96th percentile, then you end up with 207 being the likely Commended cutoff. But it could be 206 or 208.