Testmaster’s updated cutoff SI score of 219 for CA seems too low to me. I am expecting 221 cutoff for CA and 222 for NJ and DC.
Is SI cutoff for commended determined nationally (of all PSAT test takers) or state-by-state until they hit the target of 50,000 students?
If latter, concordance be damned, pg 11 suggests it should be right around 200?
@OHToCollege Nationally. Whatever SI score the 50,000th student had nationally.
@OHToCollege Its determined nationally, usually the top 97% or so of test takers. The Si tables indicate it should be around 200-202. But testmasters is somehow saying it will be 210 which is 99 percentile si, which is impossible since the commended cut off historically has been around 97%. I think testmasters predictions will turn out to be too high in the end for the least competitive states and too low for the more competitive states, because right now the range of scores has been compresses to 10 points which isn’t realistic and has never happened for the PSAT. The results usually vary be more than 20 points between the highest cutoff state and the lowest cutoff state. For a more reasonable estimate for your state I would recommend subtracting 5 points from testmasters prediction if you are in a less competitive state
Example: Iowa testmasters:212
212-5=207 revised
If the state is more competitive, add 5.
Example: California testmasters:219
219+5=224 revised
This gets a more realistic range of cutoff scores between more and less competitive states.
Using this calculation the commended cutoff would be 205
That would mean a SI of 200 at 97% as listed on page 11 should do it. I have no reason to doubt pg 11, unlike the concordance tables, SI %tiles are not marked preliminary. The math is simple top 3%ile will give you appx 50K students of 1.5M PSAT takers.
My head spins doing all this math! What you are saying is that you may not be a commended student, but conceivably be a SF in a very poor performing state?!
That has been always the case @OHToCollege in a very low cutoff state.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19175044/#Comment_19175044
Look at North Dakota or Wyoming
The lowest cutoff states usually matched the nationally commended SI.
@HelpfulDad Right, last year the commended was 202 and the cutoff for Wyoming was 202. That means last year Wyoming was very uncompetitive, so much so that the SI cutoff was at just 97 percentile. This year, however testmasters is projecting the Wyoming cutoff to be 210, probably the 99 percentile which is an unrealistic jump considering how low the Wyoming scores were last year. I would think the Wyoming cutoff would be at the highest 205.
@kyrieIrving2 these predictions continue to be based on the concordance tables. It stands to reason that based on that analysis commended would be about 210. Nothing’s changed from what they said a week or so ago.
I’m not saying that the concordance tables are an incorrect way to look at it - I’m just saying this isn’t new info. (other than confirming the commended of 210 per their analysis - something that we could have concluded ourselves). Until they respond to the percentile tables I’m thinking there’s no new info. here, folks.
@kyrieIrving2 North Dakota and West Virginia were at 201. Nothing wrong with that.
Because there are more test-takers this year, I think commended will start somewhere in the middle of the 97th percentile. That’s assuming anything north of 1.67 million junior participants.
Even if 2 million juniors took it, they‘d have to dip into the 97th for commended. No way the cutoff will be 210 if 210 really is 99th.
Only time will tell. Until April, all we can do is speculating.
@MatzoBall I think that the cutoff could definitely be higher - the National Merit Scholarship is not going to be awarded to the top 1/2 of 1 percent if that group has mysteriously doubled in number or more.
The reality is, the new PSAT has had its percentiles changed to reflect people who do not actually take the test and are presumed to have scored lower - ie - the test used to compare you to only other test takers (college bound mostly) and now compares you to pretend students who never took the test as well (based, presumably, on other national test percentiles???).
At any rate, since the percentiles do not reflect the same group of students that they used to represent - the top 3% of only those who took the test and is now a pretend national percentile of all similar age students with lots of crazy low scores included - I am sure that the required percentiles will change as well. Or else, there will suddently be 36000-50000 National Merit Semi-Finalists instead of 16000. I doubt that highly.
This might have been said before so sorry for repeating - but if 210 was the Commended Cut-off that means that 1% of 11th grade test takers scored Commended or higher. Given that Commended or higher is 50,000 (hard number, not adjustable or negotiable) that means that 5,000,000 juniors took the test - which is an absurd notion. Therefore, which is incorrect - the SI percentiles OR the preliminary concordance tables? They both come from CB so not sure it makes sense to rely on one and not the other w/o good reason. The concordance tables are, of course, preliminary and may not be very accurate when applied to the tails of the distribution. Those are two complications surrounding any analysis that relies on concordance at this point. Of course, we also don’t have a source for the SI percentiles - they aren’t marked “preliminary” so I doubt they are going to change, and CB has removed any explanation of what these are based on (actual tests? Research study? Is it a “representative” group or a “user” group? We simply don’t know).
Given all these uncertainties it seems a bit premature to conclude that 50,000 11th graders scored 210 or higher on the PSAT. At the very least CB should be able to tell everyone where those SI percentiles came from.
Can anyone predict if a 210 will qualify in AZ?
Dude, if you read any of these 4000+ posts in this thread, you’d be aware that no one knows what the new cutoffs will look like.
@WayTutoring, I was talking about cutoffs for Commended, not NMSF. Not enough kids in 99th to capture 50,000 Commendeds.