@JuicyMango one more reading question would have had me at a 217 so if it ends up at 216 or 217 I’ll be devastated. In all honesty though I feel like the scores are going to go up more than people are predicting…it’s going to be such a long wait either way
y’all need to take a chill pill. You won’t find out until September.
@Basoonitup Oh, the irony…
@websensation, I think Cal State Long Beach does. Here is a list compiled by CC folk. I don’t know if it is up to date for 2016/17. http://nmfscholarships.yolasite.com
Can I get semifinalist with a 216 SI in Georgia (1450 score, 710 verbal, 740 math)? I’ve asked this question a few times in this thread and still haven’t gotten a response. I’m aware that obviously no one knows what the cutoffs will be until CB releases them officially, but please, if you have some expertise in judging past cutoffs, could you please give me some kind of rough estimate or chance of me getting NMS semifinalist? It would really put my mind at ease over these next few months. Thanks a bunch.
@loquatical NMS Corp uses graduating seniors. The problem with California (and all high cutoff states) is not that they don’t have an accurate allocation of winners, its that there are a ton of high scorers in that state because of great schools, lots of prep, knowledge of the test and a lot of competitiveness at top high schools with a lot of smart kids.
Its not like before when kids just went into a test ‘cold’ and the smart kids got top scores and mediocre kids didn’t. Even mediocre students can make the cutoffs if they work really hard on preparing for the test. The combination of all of the above reasons produces the high cutoffs in CA, NJ, MA, and DC.
The key question this year (as mentioned by another poster) is weather this test was just as easy for those same top scores. I think for the ones that are really strong in CR/Writing and with the right prep, yes, but I bet a lot of other kids are not as strong and maybe did not have the traditional prep materials and were thrown off by this new format. No clue though. Would love to hear from one of those schools that historically has produced a lot of NMF.
@Yakisoba Best guess is here (which you must have seen in other posts):
http://collegeadmissions.testmasters.com/update-psat-scores-cut-national-merit-2016/
Stop asking - no one knows more than this. There are lots of detailed posts where people have been doing analysis. Look at @GMTplus7 or simply read these threads.
I haven’t had time to follow all the posts but I haven’t noticed anyone on this forum posting a perfect 228. Maybe they just don’t want to rub it in to all the stressed people on this site. But I would have thought if the cutoffs are going to be very high, that we would see a significant number of students hitting the ceiling and posting perfect scores. Have i missed something?
@Yakisoba Your score looks really good to me. Nobody can give you a for sure answer, though, because we have all been left in the dark. Everyone is guessing. :-S
@mathyone There’s a lot of really high scores of 220+. I don’t think the cutoff will be too low. Some anecdotal evidence, my school rarely gets a semifinalist (CA), but this year there were index scores of 213, 218, 219, and 225.
@mathyone
No, you haven’t missed anything. Like some have predicted, there is a 2014:2015 SI correlation, and a 228 SI scores right around 240… there were very few 240s last year. As an example, a 220 is around 225. So, like has been mentioned, if you are over 220 (220+) you’re likely fine for EVERY state.
@fisisk Well, among my friends (I live in CA also), there were index scores in the low 200’s and 1 score of 219, but that was the highest. Who knows how it varies in other high schools.
@JuicyMango Did your school have NMF last year? If so, how many?
In looking at some old college board percentile charts, I see that they have 99 percentile and also 99+ percentile. Anyone know what 99+ percentile means?
@fisisk Your comment on South Bay schools really hits home. If you look at the link below you can see all the qualifiers from Gunn, Mission SJ, Homestead, Pali, etc. These schools traditionally have a TON of qualifiers so they are the ones that make it hard to qualify in CA, it is not the sheer (PSAT word if I remember correctly lol) population of CA that makes it difficult. If you take the time to read the names, you see a lot of Asians, Indians, and Whites; but very few Latinos. This might not be the place to make this point, but as the MAJORITY group in CA, Latinos should be all over the list and that just speaks to the absurd racial divide in our society… but I’m sure that doesn’t concern much of the people on this feed…
If I’m reading this right, the max this year is 228? If so, I have a junior friend who got that score. I’m from Missouri.
@mathyone As it has been mentioned earlier, I think 228 this year directly correlates to a 240 last year (according to the concordance from CB). My 220 this year correlates directly to a 220 from last year. This seems like it will make finding the SI cutoff much harder because there a lot more people occupying the same score range. It went from 20 data points between 220 and 240 to 8 between 220 and 228.
@whitespace, yes, 228 would be the score for a 1520 also the max.
@LAD2266 Yes, I cannot understand why CB chose to compress the scoring range. Very poor decision. This will just make everything even more arbitrary than it already was, from how the tests are equated to deciding where to draw the cut-off for each state.
I have seen the all the estimated cut offs, I am aware of the mixed views on the preliminary concordance tables, and I too thought the early Testmasters’ and Prepscholars’ estimates were too low. However, with this year’s scale dropping from 240-60 to 228-48 (the same 180 point spread), how is it possible for the top 1% of SI this year to NOT have a similar distribution. If the info reported earlier is correct, last year’s lowest SI in the 99th percentile was 213/240 - 27 points all in the top 1%! Compare that to an SAT distribution, on the 1600 scale, the top score is obviously 1600, but if you score 1480 you are still in the 99th percentile. Also on an earlier post, someone said that a GC showed an SI score of 207 as 99% (and the true bottom score of the 99th could be lower still). That’s 21 points at a minimum in the 99th%. If the top to bottom spread is similar to last year, then the lower SI, the spread for NMSF and the state correlations of the early estimates might surprisingly be closer to the final cut offs.
I hope tomorrow some people get to their GC’s and find out (and post) what the info they got from CB says as far as the lowest SI for the 99%. If it’s in the range of 201-203, then the earlier cut off estimates by state are looking pretty accurate and CA, DC, MA and NJ just might have cut offs around 210-211.