@JuicyMango, well I complete my TODAY mission - make at least one person happy. You do very well yourself. In North Dallas, there are one or two schools have 20NMFs and 40plus NMFs, but the rest has none or lucky to have one. About perfect 1520, maybe they are in 99.95%Tile (based on data about 500 versus 15000) and those students are considered at extreme end of the score (extreme rare compare to rest)
@wildcat1915, thank you. This table goes along with my Data Representation (ha ha ha ACT words)
Wow, so the SI 99% goes down to 205…that’s promising! What qualifies as 99+, how much over 99?
Thank you @Wildcat15!
does that mean 214 is the 99.5 mark?
Yes, Thank You @wildcat15 !! It was helpful to see the way the 99th percentiles were broken down.
Does anybody have the report from last year?
Very interesting to see that the sophomore percentiles are almost identical to the junior percentiles. If the test can’t measure much difference/improvement for the top students who have an additional year of high school, seems like it’s too easy and a poor tool for screening top students for scholarships.
Yes, anyone have the link to the report from last year? that would be interesting to see the breakdowns and then we could look at corresponding percentage for our particular state??
So the cut-off for commended should be 200, correct? That’s the top 4%.
Actually, looking at page 10 of the college board’s report, https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/2015-psat-nmsqt-understanding-scores.pdf you can see that on the “national representative” percentile a 700 was 99.5% for juniors, but the sophomores needed a 720 to score in the 99.5%. Evidently the college board thinks that students become worse at reading and writing during their sophomore year of high school.
Last year, a 224 was a 99+, this year a 214 is a 99+. A difference of 10 points. That says to me the concordance tables are way off. Shifting the range down 12 points looks more correct than the high cutoffs shown on testmaster’s predictions.
The minimum score for SI 99% was 213 last year and 205 this year. A difference of 8 points. Folks, the state cutoffs are likely going down for every state compared to last year. Probably 8-12 points.
And there is a “cut and paste” typo in the selection index percentile table for what might have been the most telling field, the std deviation for the selection index. Someone with a better stats background than me could probably explain this better, but if we knew this years selection index mean and stddev and last years mean and stddev, we might be able to draw better cutoffs.
Looks like commended is around 200. Many students have scores in the 200-204 range, bunching up the 97% and 98% groupings.
Assuming a normal distribution, the distance between the first 99 percentile point and the 50 percentile point should be 2.326*sigma. From the tables for the two years, I get sigma = 31.0 SI points for the 2014 tests and sigma = 25.4 SI points for the 2015 tests. The 50 percentile points are 141 for 2014 and 146 for 2015.
@mathyone, the reality is that those sophomores taking the PSAT are a more select group of kids who are choosing to take the exam. Different population from the junior class, most of whom are “forced” to sit the PSAT. I’d expect higher percentiles, all else equal, from the 10th grade.
we need to keep in mind that these are taken from a sample size, not the actual data from the test…the updated version of this could (and probably will) be completely different
Here is the report “Understanding 2014 PSAT/NMSQT Scores” which contains selection index percentiles. As has been previously noted 213 was the last score listed as 99th percentile.
@ billchu2 I think that makes some sense because someone reported the 50% score to be 1009. If scores for each section were spread evenly you get 25+25+25=75*2=150. or 250+250+500 = 1000. But we know there are different section scores that can be earned.