Since S26 plays in the band he has to be at every football game, I am volunteering this week and he was shocked, apparently he doesn’t want me there. I will be embarrassing or something. Of course I am just looking forward to seeing him play. The football team is actually doing well this year but he hadn’t even noticed.
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We have a PSAT event in October. Is anyone else going to give this a whirl?
Definitely yes. D26 had a promising score on the PSAT 10 and has been doing a little studying (very little, it sometimes seems) to try for National Merit status. She was indifferent to this possibility until we happened to visit a school with a generous Natl Merit program and she really liked it there - now, she’s at least making some effort to prepare for the PSAT in October. We’ll see how it goes.
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Fellow Tulane parent here! My oldest is there right now (current senior also accepted EA)
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I am going to give that list to my son. It sounds like a helpful way to think about things.
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By “event” do you mean the test? X26 will do it, but more as practice in using blue book under proper test conditions. More focus on SAT, which - in a huge logistical help - school has arranged to have onsite in March (another outcome of their new very effective college counseling department).
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S26 will take it, only because our school offers it to all 11th graders for free. It’ll be a good practice for upcoming SAT in Nov.
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Yes. Should have used the word test.
I didn’t realize how challenging for some locations to gain access to testing until late last year. Ours is onsite as well.
For free is a great option. Ours definitely is not that.
Our child practiced over the summer using Khan and the Princeton guides. She feels as if the Princeton was more helpful.
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Ours is free too, which is definitely nice. Especially since D26 will be using it as a practice test only. She is highly unlikely to get anywhere near the NM cut off in our state.
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Yes, our high school is still saying they will not offer the PSAT at all this year. Hoping they get it together at the last minute. In S23’s year they did offer it but didn’t have enough seats … there was a lottery for seats and in the end, he didn’t get to take it either.
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Oh, that’s frustrating. Ours has always offered PSAT, but the onsite SAT is new.
They are also having a SAT on site soon (not sure exact date) but that is only open to seniors, and the March date will only be for juniors - they want the onsite options to be for the people who need them most, so juniors who want to take it earlier than March would look for testing elsewhere.
None of the testing (SAT, AP etc) our school offers is free, but you can apply for a waiver of the fee if there is financial need.
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I’ve never looked very closely into NM. Is commended nationwide and NM by state? Looking at X’s school profile, last year had 27 commended and 10 finalists, the year before 17 commended and 2 finalists. I’m assuming commended is a nice to have albeit obviously not as prestigious and financially rewarding as being a finalist.
Any updates on how it went?
Cut offs are by state. Not sure about commended. My oldest was NM commended with a 1450 a few years ago. It was something to throw on the common app under national awards. But honestly didn’t mean much (except that he tests well, which colleges would already see from his SAT)
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Yes, it is a bifurcated system.
Each student to takes the PSAT in October of their junior year will receive a selection index (SI) score which is made up of 2X the verbal score added to the math score then the sum is divided by 10.
For the Commended Scholar, the SI level is set at the number in which there are roughly 34,000 students nationally. This year it was 208.
The Commended Scholar pool is a further culled by about half to 16,000 to get to National Merit Semi-Finalist (NMSF). These are determined proportionately at the state level (based on number of HS graduates in each state - not the number of PSAT takers in each state).
Note, Commended and Semi-Finalists are determined by the SI. If the student becomes a Semi-Finalist, then they will need to take some extra steps to become a Finalist and potentially a Scholar.
Compass does an outstanding job of summarizing all of this along with prognosticating and tracking the process and results.
The process can be quite beneficial to many students with full tuition and sizeable partial scholarships to certain schools, including Alabama, U.Arizona, UTulsa, USC, among many others. There is a thread here on CC about NM scholarship schools.
Generally speaking, the more selective schools do not provide much in the way of benefits for a student’s NM status.
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Great explanation. I remember being totally confused (with my oldest) that the reading was double counted. So random – and definitely hurts students who test higher in math. Have you ever seen any explanation as to why? (I think in the case of my son, if his reading/math scores had been flipped, he would have qualified as a semi-finalist)
No, not really. However, this did benefit D25 as her verbal was a bit higher than her math. While D25 is STEM focused, she tends to do slightly better in her verbal subjects as opposed to the STEM subjects. This is one of those rare instances as of late that the verbal leaning students get a boost compared to the math / science.
Some schools have reserved seating for their own students but you have to talk to the counselor to get a spot.
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Seems to me this would tend to benefit native English speakers vs others, but no idea if this was an intent or just an unintentional byproduct of this method.
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