My Son received his SAT score Saturday, 1550 with an SI of 232. We are glad to have this out of the way as before this it was a 210 from his sophomore year. We filled out the NMSC form last night and am happy to have this part done. The rest of his application looks above average. He was thinking he may have scored a 1600 as it was easy for him but in retrospect not as easy as he thought. Now its essay and app. time as we may be behind. He has written 6 essays this week as per “Hack the Essay” so we are on the way. I imagine there isn’t much you can do about Scholar vs NMF and our main plan is the NMF schools anyway. I really appreciate the help we have received from these threads at Cc this year. Especially to diotima.
NMF Bama question: I just crossed Bama off our list for Full Ride Colleges. Is it possible that a student with NMF and NHRP as a URM could receive a higher amount $ at Bama?
I am sure this has been asked before but I could not find any recent entries… When sending SAT scores to NMSC, do we send “all scores” or just the SAT (EBRW/MATH) - as in no subject tests?
@TexanIndian just SAT.
If you do happen to send subject tests as well it won’t cause a problem though. I used a free score report for NMSC when S took subject tests in June and of course there was no way to avoid having the subject tests on the score report. NMSC just accepted the regular SAT score with no trouble.
Thank you for your posts and i find them very educational esp for the first time parents.
Regarding the 4000 college sponsored awards, there is no public information on this list? For example NMSC provides this PDF for their own awards/funds. I am unable to find out the remaining ones.
http://www.thesismag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/17-National-Merit-Winners.pdf
Once again Thank you.
@clemsongrad, there’s some roundabout information on it, in the report on where Merit Scholars go to school. The annual reports take a while to come out so the most recent one I could find is from 2015-2016. Beginning on page 14 of the linked document you can see where the students go to college, and for each school there’s a split to indicate how many scholarships were NMSC-sponsored vs college-sponsored. For instance Harvard’s 233 are entirely NMSC-sponsored because Harvard doesn’t participate in National Merit, while UT Dallas had 119 Scholars but the school sponsored 94 of them.
Good info @traveler98 - thanks!
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to figure out where the rest of the NMFs end up, at least not that I could find. I think NMSC would only have information on students who accept a scholarship, although maybe someone with a previous NMF who didn’t accept any scholarship would be able to chime in if I’m mistaken. If anyone does have a link to some info on where all 15k NMFs go, and not just the 50% who get scholarships, that would be very interesting.
FYI - There’s new data over at Art’s. Things like how many NMSFs in each state, number of points each state changed, etc.
ETA: The # of SF per state column is for 2016 but not a typo. Art explains lower down. He used the 2016 number, the most recent one available, to parse size of change in cutoff by state population, with # of NMSF as a proxy for population…
Thank you for the link. It is very useful. You really are an expert at this topic. Thanks for helping us.
Ha ha, not an expert just a nerd for data. My S is an only child but I’ve been aware of NM since I was an NMF way back in the day. So I just like to gather up a lot of info about NM and the process.
Thanks for the tip @DiotimaDM. I don’t know what Art did with his blog but I can actually open it right up now, and that new post is very interesting!
I noticed that Art listed the number of NMSF by state, has anyone added up that up to see how close to 16,000 it is?
Well, it was from 2016 so that is in the 2015-2016 annual report linked above. 16,227 for that year. I wonder if “the book” has a total for this year or just lists the names? Maybe @jswani could look if still in possession of the book.
Oh! I didn’t catch that Art was using the 2015-2016 numbers thanks for the clarification!
What do those three digit numbers mean by the names in the NMSF booklet?
@xxluvforeverxx, The 3 digit code refers to College Major and Career Codes as defined by NMSC (link below) and is usually selected by the students taking PSAT in their answer booklet.
http://nationalmerit.imodules.com/s/1758/images/gid2/editor_documents/collegemajorcareercodes.pdf
are there forms that national merit semifinalists have to fill out in order to advance to be a finalist? my counselor said there are none but i thought i heard that there are? can someone please clarify? thank you!
@absolutevalue Yes!! There is an application with basic student info but also EC’s and a student essay! The school also has a portion of the application that they must fill out, including academic record, school report, recommendation, etc! Either talk to your principal or call NMSC ASAP! The application deadline is Oct 11.