College Board and National Merit are different organizations. College Board is trying to “level the playing field” by changing the SAT- at least that is the marketing claim. Most people believe they are trying to slow the loss of market share to ACT.
National Merit’s way of leveling the playing field has always been to guarantee a certain percentage of scholars come from each state. More populous states get more scholars but quite often they end up with higher cut offs as well. When you cap it at roughly 16,000, something has to give.
A lot of universities opt out of the program because it puts too much emphasis on one test taken one time and no standardized test seems to be able to get away from income correlation.
Their contest, their rules. Most scholarship contests tag on an element of financial need. This is one of the few left that doesn’t.
If you think the NM rules feel arbitrary, head over to one of the selective school forums. Admission to those schools feels very much like a lottery and those from really poor schools are often given a bump in that process as well, because they have overcome more obstacles.
@ambitionsquared@suzyQ7
It’s the Silicon Valley schools for sure, the “Asian high schools” that typically have average SAT scores of over 1900 have over 45+ semifinalists a year. A few like Monta Vista, Leland, Harker, Lynbrook, Gunn, and especially Mission San Jose which had over 100 out of 500 total students a few years ago.
[url=<a href=“http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp%5DThis%5B/url”>http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp]This[/url] gives 1,776,132 public high school students ALONE. Divide that by four (not exact, but whatever) and you get 444,033 juniors.
Lets also assume that only half of juniors take the test, giving around 222,017 eligible students.
There are 16,000 NMSFs. California has roughly 12% of US population (cite: Wikipedia ), so lets also assume that goes for juniors.
16,0000.12 is 1,960. If we use the top 1% cutoff (222,0170.01), we get 2,200 students. Too many for NMSC. High achieving schools make this problem worse.
Others check my math please, I’m only a sleep deprived student.
ETA: Numbers shown in http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf show that CA cutoff was actually around 1.1%. Still high compared to other states with lower populations. I wonder if NMSC uses overall state population or eligible junior population to determine quotas (would change CA to 11%).
Page 29 shows the distribution by state. California has twice as many semi finalists as New York but nowhere near twice as many participants. The allocation is based on graduating seniors from what I recall.
@loquatical Your math worked out to roughly how many California got. It is just that those schools mean the top 2,000 scores are a lot higher than in other states.
@gettingschooled But also factor in that historically CA has a higher score cutoff than NY since there is almost the same amount of CA and NY students if CA had NY’s cutoff score there would be even more semifinalists.
@gettingschooled IMO CA, MA, NJ and DC have enough high scoring students at the top who probably got very high scores. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if other students scored relatively low. For example,. if in CA 2,000 students scored above 222 while others did not, NMSFs are going to come from these 2,000 students. Some of competitive high schools in CA regularly produce 30 to 45 NMSFs each per year.
What I am saying is that the most accurate way to predict the cutoff score at this point for a school which produces let’s say 30 NMSFs per year is to find out how many students scored above your SI score this year. If only 20~25 kids scored above you, then you have a good possibility of making the cutoff. However, if 40 students scored above your SI score, you might not have made the cutoff.
In addition, it’s almost certain that students who are super strong in Math but not super strong in Reading and Writing sections WILL NOT make NMSF cutoff for high cutoff states.
@Basoonitup Umm for what exactly? I seem to be doing fine academically. And I wouldn’t classify citing my states cut-off versus that of other states as “whining”, but that’s just my opinion.
@Basoonitup CB only provided 1 practice PSAT (since this version is new), which I studied and reviewed before the actual test. Throughout the summer I had been studying the old version PSAT because I didn’t know we would be required to take the new one, so I was a little taken aback come October. And I’m only human, so I was a bit nervous during the test and made a few errors here and there. But I’m not asking to qualify for semi-finals with an unreasonable score…my score is still in the 99th percentile. And according to a lot of website predictions, I qualify in 40+ states. So I think it’s justifiable that I complain about how I would qualify in almost every state but my own.
@JuicyMango it’s ok by me if you talk about it here - it’s understandably nerve-wracking, potentially $$ are riding on it & often scores are something kids don’t feel comfortable talking about at school.
@Basoonitup well clearly you and your 1500 have nothing to worry about so I think everyone would appreciate it if you could refrain from making comments in this thread if you’re just going to try to tear others down. Thanks!
I’m in almost the same situation - I got a 215 and Pennsylvania’s predicted cutoff is 216. I’m hoping that everyone just turns out to be overestimating the cutoffs because I would be so upset if my score was one point away from qualifying in my own state yet several points higher than cutoffs in other states.
@engineur Thank god there’s someone out there who feels the same way I feel. I’m not faring much better with a 217…I would be crushed if the cut-off for my state was a 218 or 219, which is pretty much equal to 1 writing question.
), so lets also assume that goes for juniors.