Presumably you mean 217 or HIGHER. But I wouldn’t be concerned at this point if your school hasn’t said anything. Some schools are quicker to notify than others. Some have formal announcements. Some do not. Some will have something of a presentation ceremony (our school has it at a school board meeting). Others do not. Congrats.
My daughter went to a private school in FL that has produced over 50 NMSF the last two years. A few more are added each year. It’s the highest for any school in FL and there are under 400 kids. They do extensive prep in class and up to 11 hours of prep are offered each week from the beginning of 9th grade until the exam. They enjoy being named top school in FL for NM.
I am jealous of all the schools with high numbers of NMSF. My sons school is a relatively good one as compared to others in our immediate area. He had the highest score in the school and did not make NMSF. PSAT is definately not emphasized though. All 10 graders take the test with the school paying but few juniors even take the test since the parents need to pay. There is also not test prep offered through the school.
Out of 50+ HS in our city and the surrounding metro area, one public magnet HS had 43 out of about 95 NMSF. A couple of private catholic schools accounted for about 20 more. The rest are pretty spread around, and probably half of those schools rarely have anyone qualify.
DS attends one in the latter group. No prep or focus on PSAT at all. Last years Val who had a 34 ACT wasn’t aware of NM at all and didn’t take it as a result. He would have had a legitimate shot at NMF if he had taken it, and ended up attending the state flagship that offers a full ride.
D is at an academically rigorous parochial school in California where there are 26 commended this year out of a class of about 425. We won’t know until next week how many are NMSF, especially with a cutoff of 222. The school has a very well respected and demanding IB curriculum, which attracts a number of academically-motivated students. But the PSAT isn’t emphasized, other than all kids being required to take it their junior year. I did hear of one student who is commended (at least) and who took a private PSAT prep course, but that’s not typical at all. There are definitely several top public schools in the area where there are 20 or more NMSFs every year.
With the OR updates yesterday and today, looks like the estimated predicted ranges in Art’s blog were pretty darn solid. In fact most of the cutoffs so far are either right on his predicted most likely score, or 1 point above and still within the predicted range.
Agreed @LOUKYDAD
I thought several would trend higher than Art’s most likely, but there have been only a couple. We still have some fine tuning to do, but over all, predictions were very solid.
My S18 (221 VA and missed NMSF) goes to a public high school that has, to my knowledge, never had a semi finalist or finalist. ( At least not since my time there as first as a student, then as a teacher.) I find this very puzzling: on one hand, I teach, among other things, an AP class there, (20 year veteran!) so I know we have some highly talented kids–a few who go on to do extremely well on their SATs. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that our school would miss a wonderful PR opportunity by not announcing these winners–at least in-house or as part of a faculty meeting discussion. My senior year, two friends and I qualified as Commended, and the local paper ran our pictures with a very nice press release. Of course, this was a gazillion years ago! It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any recognition of this type, however. We also used to recognize, via a College Board press release, those students who earned AP Scholar designations. Again, this has fallen by the wayside–and I know for a fact we have had several AP Scholars within the past few years.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s due to a perceived competition between AP courses and Dual Enrollment courses–to the point that the local community college has waged an all-out “war” on AP courses–to the point of posting “information” on their website explaining why students should not take AP classes, highly discouraging their Upward Bound students from taking AP, and telling one of our teachers that she could no longer teach any dual or adjunct classes for them if she continued to teach an AP class as well.
I find the situation very sad. Both Dual and AP classes are important, and students need guidance into which best suits them. There should be no competition. Even sadder is the fact that we refuse to acknowledge our students’ accomplishments–evidently any press packet from the College Board is immediately trashed. I guarantee my S won’t receive any recognition for his Commended status or his AP Scholar with Distinction award.
^That is sad about the lack of recognition. S’s school does a nice picture and article in the school newsletter and the pictures also scroll in the newsfeed on the school district website, for NMSF, Commended, and National Hispanic. I don’t think they do a picture for the AP Scholar awards but they do recognize the students in the newsletter. I think they might even pass on the NM stuff to the local newspaper. I especially think it’s sad about the AP-trashing. That just seems so unnecessary…there’s plenty of room for both AP and dual enrollment.
@tallgrass We’re in SC so not the hardest state to make it in. lol
Our school district sends a card to all residents of our town with NMF and commended kids’ pictures on it. We only have 1-2 NMF per year for our entire school district.
Our school puts the names in their weekly email newsletter that goes to all the parents and students along with ap scholar stuff and anything else they find out about.
@3scoutsmom Can I ask you how your visit to UTD was? My son is looking at UTD with NMF scholarship.
Everytime a local high school athlete goes on to compete at the college level, there is always a “signing” type of ceremony at the school and the local community paper always does an article. 9 times out of 10 it is a D2, NAIA or D3 school. I imagine the average person reading the article would guess there is more scholarship money on the table than there actually is. While I am a cheerleader for every one of these kids, it won’t bother me at all if they do at least as much for a NM kid. It is at least as big of a deal in my book. Should also be something the community celebrates.
YES @loukydad! It would be nice if academic accomplishments got even 1% the accolades of athletic accomplishments. No offense to athletes, of course 
D18 hasn’t heard anything from her HS yet though we’re pretty sure she made it. I guess the school’s keeping it close to their vest until the official notification time. D18’s large public HS had 17 NMSF kids last year out of a class of around 700. I expect that number to increase this year. Note that the number has significantly increased over the past five years. This year the school gave the top 10% of 10th grade PSAT kids a free in-school PSAT prep class for several weeks prior to the PSAT (and D18 only went to two of the biweekly classes and took one of the practice tests, arg!). The school’s goal is to get to 40 NMSF per year.
As for acknowledgement, the school has a breakfast meeting for all the NMSF kids and it gets covered in the county newspaper. We’ll have to wait and see what all happens. I haven’t paid too much attention to it previously.
Final note. The significant increase in NMSF kids at D18’s HS was due to the movement of high tech Asian families into the area after the 2008/9 recession. The HS is now 20% Asian and I imagine the 9-10th grades are even higher. I saw a photo of last year’s NMSF group and every single one was Asian (there’s quite a mix of Indians, Koreans, and Chinese here). Many/most of their parents are foreign born, based on their strong accents, while the kids are fully Americanized (probably born here, no accents, and do the fist bumps, lingo, etc.). What’s most interesting to me is that the 2nd generation Asian kids (born to Asian-American parents who were born here long ago) are not as high academic achievers as the first-borns even though their parents are in high tech and live in the same neighborhoods. I think it would be really interesting to see a chart of academic achievement vs. generation.
@vistajay My four children attend a large inner city public high school (1600 students/325 in S’s class) that also has an IB program. Many of our students come from magnet middle schools. So it is VERY emphasized at their school and everyone in the school 9-11 is required to take the PSAT which is paid for by the school. We usually have the most (if not only) NMF in our two county area that also includes many good public high schools. We typically tie with the large catholic high school for the most in the two county area…which we did last year and most likely will this year. We typically have four which is the most in our area (including amongst the private schools.)
@DavidPuddy I am hoping 210 is the mark too.
Thanks to this discussion, I just learned there are AP Scholars. Good to know, as DS already has a certificate listed on the College Board site, and will probably have a “higher” level by the end of the year. Would not even have thought about this otherwise
@3lovingmom we visted UTD when DS18 was only in 10th grade on our way back from a National Merit day at OU for his sister at OU so he had a good comparison of the two schools and their National Merit packages. He hated OU! His sister loved it, go figure… I was starting to think that we were doing the school tour thing too early for him and that he won’t like any school at that point but when we got to UTD he did a 180 and loved everything about it!
A student gave us a tour and she was from out of state and could have gone anywhere but picked UTD and did a really good job of representing the school, we met with a prof for a one on one discussion about a prospective major and then we met with a rep form the honnors colleges that went into detail about thier honors program and their national merit package. The more he learned about my son the more excited he got, they did a fantastic job of making him feel wanted and he was only in10th grade! From that day forward it was UTD all the way!
DH has a coworker who did his undergrad at UTD he was national merit and his brother went to UTD as a Mcdermott scholar so he’s had to chance to talk to him about his experiences there and then he found out one of favorite teacher went to UTD for grad school back in the day. Since it’s been almost two years since his visit we plan to go to one of the National Merit preview days.