@suzyQ7 and @nillupa
There are some scholarships for commended :
Liberty University - full tuition
Oakwood University - 80% tuition
Gordon College - 60% tuition
Wright State - Full Rides for Ohio residents
@tryingforharvard Nobody knows - it’s all speculation at this point. The prepscholar guesstimates seem too low to me, however. Prepscholar seems to have subtracted 12 points across the board (240-12=228). Logically if 228 is roughly 95% of 240 (last year’s maximum), then I would expect that the cutoff would be 95% of last year’s numbers. But that’s also a guess and state cutoffs have fluctuated historically year to year. So my best advice is to try to be patient until National Merit Corporation divulges that information.
Receiving merit $$ directly from a university is the best way to bring down college costs. Colleges are the best source of large merit awards and those with large NMF awards are amg the most generous scholarship packages available.
FWIW, some kids are graduating from high school beyond jr/community college level offerings.
While we have yet to see a concordance table for the 2015 vs 2014 Selection Index, we do have both the 2015 ACT Profile Report - National and the ACT / SAT concordance table. Why do we believe that while there were only 10,094 or .53% who received a single-sitting ACT composite score of 35 or higher and that the concordance to the SAT reflects a 2330 SAT as compared to a 35 ACT that the 2015 PSAT data is going to provide results that substantially deviate from this 2015 ACT curve as a 34 ACT was achieved by 25,923 or 1.3% so the distribution is what would be expected.
@braxjax You are so right! NMF status is only worth about $200,000, and most of us have that sitting around in our sock drawer. It’s silly to worry about it.
@dallaspiano The reason I commented is bc your post made it sound like NM scholarships would make a huge difference in your life for that particular list of schools you posted. Some schools like Rice don’t offer any NM scholarships. Some NM scholarships are a tiny percentage of an enormous price tag. (For example, SMU offers $5000 which still leaves a huge gap between it and the $45000+ price tags.) and others like TTU offer huge awards. To list them all together when stating, “Money is hard to find at this time, especially to my family,” is not very clear.
Fwiw, my kids nees scholarship $$, so your quoted comment is one I can relate to, but NM only makes specific schools affordable. This link has a good list of large awards: http://nmfscholarships.yolasite.com. This link’s last few pages update that link’s info: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/national-merit-scholarships/649276-nmf-scholarships-an-updated-compilation-p64.html
Got mail from UTD today, wondering if CB released nmsf names to colleges or if colleges are guessing just like we are.
It’s true @braxjax that PSAT isn’t that important if you don’t want to take advantage of the great NM scholarships. But what a great thing it is if you need it financially! Otherwise, high SAT scores will get you some scholarships, too.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, Mme
With respect thank you for information, but whether NMF scholarship make a huge difference t in a student’s life, then it’s up to her or him or family to see in their own perspective. Have you seen 2004 movie Butterfly Effect, in short it’s about a popular hypothetical example of chaos theory which illustrates how small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time. Same things with NMF, it will open many doors to other unseen scholarships. For real life info, SMU offered scholarship to my brother last year, our family end up paying ONLY for dorm food. My brother had no NMF. Thing did happen differently in life than the way you see by surfing webs.
Count me as one of those mom’s for whom NMF could make a huge difference for both my son and my family. He IS going to a (comparatively) inexpensive state school. But said state school is still is still $21K a year. Merit aid and Bright Futures will help a lot but it will not pay for everything. Meaning either financial struggles for a family with caring for a disabled adult or loans for a young man who wishes to dedicate his life to teaching. I’m sorry if I sound obsessed because I don’t want a future teacher saddled with student loan debt. Yes, he should absolutely enjoy high school - and he does. And yes, he should fail sometimes and he does. Yes, he should work in college and he will. But the Florida Incentive Scholarship is absolutely a game changer for him. So yes, this one test was very important.
I heard that 40 out 830 juniors at Boca Raton High School scored in the 99%. That is twice as many in any past year. I believe the cutoff will be MUCH higher for NMSF and don’t think 1450/217 in Florida will be enough.
The question for that would be how many of those scored 99+. The 99 cutoffs do seem generous. My son was 1430/216 so we are well aware he’s on the bubble - he’s 99 by score but 99+ by SI. And his concorded scores do match last years cutoffs. So he could make it. Or not. But the reality is none of us has the foggiest idea. I was more taking umbrage over the notion that none of us should care all that much about the PSAT.
While your information is interesting, I’m not sure it’s enough (any more than anyone’s) to predict cutoffs. Our IB school had only three scores higher than my son’s and two had the same SI because they were stronger in math.
Googling shows they had two semi finalists last year not 20 and the district had 50 total.
That was last year. These are scores for students graduating in 2017 who took the new test this past October.
@BocaDroneMom, unless we know their SI I don’t think we can compare as case in point 1370 could be as high as 212 or as low as 198.
The point about Boca is last year they had 2 semi finalists not 20.
@BocaDroneMom, just say “my bad”, nobody hold you for anything
If 2 NMSF at Boca Raton in 2014 becomes 40 in 2015 then there were a ton of new participants nationally who scored in the middle of the range on the October 2015 PSAT - I don’t think that happened so I think people are referencing PSAT scores/percentiles, not SI.
FWIW:
http://collegeadmissions.testmasters.com/update-psat-scores-cut-national-merit-2016/#more-8003
one prediction, seemingly based upon a rationale if not on much “actual data”, is a FL cut off going up from 214 to 215. Maybe the state summary reports will come out soon & shed more light?
People will know a LOT more once those state reports are released. Guessing they won’t include the SI as it’s computed differently this year and that means a little info. will be lost (but not much). They’ll need to include both percentile tables too. But one should be able to look at the “user” table and see how many kids scored in each range and figure out what the underlying test scores need to be for a cut-off. At least that’s what I am hoping :-?