@Plotinus, another thing that’s sticking with me the wrong way is that Applerouth is using the concordance tables to come up with his conclusion that the current percentiles are off. But if, as you say, the concordance tables would have truly concorded (percentile-wise) had CB used historical population data for it’s concordance tables, doesn’t that suggest that it’s the concordance tables, and NOT the current percentiles, that are off?
I’m just having a bit of trouble with Applerouth’s reasoning. He’s assuming one set of tables is fine and using it to show the flaws in the other other set. Both sets came from CB - not clear to me at all which set is fine and which isn’t.
@dallaspiano, based on your analysis what are chances for my D3: she scored a 220 and MN historically has a cut-off of 214-215. Is that higher cut-off or lower? To me it’s in the middle!
OK, wading in here…DD in CA scored a 1460/217 which CB says is 99+% (natl presumably). Assuming the reported % are not completely screwy then I can’t see the CA cutoff being in the 220’s.
Looking at the last two NMSC annual reports would indicate she is safely in:
2014 Nationally - 16,227 finalists out of 1,476,770 entrants = 1.10%
2014 California- 2,027 finalists out of 176,879 entrants = 1.15%
2013 Nationally - 16,276 finalists out of 1,462,311 entrants = 1.11%
2013 California - 1,922 finalists out of 168,137 entrants = 1.14%
Participation would have to double for her 217 to miss the cutoff (assuming the reported % is not completely screwy).
Also, she has monitored the psat hashtags on social media and says almost no one is reporting high scores, most reporting in the 1200-1300 range. In addition, her school is a high performing IB school and she knows of only one higher score than hers.
No, the Nebraska school that I attend is University of Nebraska Independent Study High School. It is an online high school. I was surprised to find out when I enrolled that their courses are much more challenging than those at the public school I attended in Texas. Anyways, my dad is currently on assignment here in Chile with the mining company that he works for but we travel back and forth from Texas, keeping our residency there.
@OHToCollege Take the entire pool of test takers’ SIs and force rank them and typically certain states perform better than your state. Either last year or the year before, CA had 6,000 commended and 2,000 NMSF. This state is large and it typically performs better than our state. So, if the CA cutoff is 223, there will be CA students, who unfortunately didn’t make their states cutoff, but are taking up slots higher than other state’s cutoffs. In addition, state’s with lower cutoffs will have students who score much higher than necessary who will also take up slots about your state’s cutoff. So IF 99+ is 99.5 and that equates to 8,000 students, you hope that other states’ students fill the buckets - 99.9, 99.8, so that your cutoff will be lower because your score is based on a national percentile. So if all the CA students (roughly 8,000) are in the 99.5+, than the next state’s cutoff could not start until the 99th percentile score. Right?
@Speedy2019 you might have more recent information than I do. I understand that 4.5 million took the PSAT? Or am I misremembering? (It was W-A-A-Y back in December!). 3.5 million normally take it so that’s an increase of 1.0 million. Where did I err?
BTW I think any increase in the junior class would be much closer to the 1.6 million than the other end.
@dallaspiano Since you took the test and you’re a junior…how did your friends do? Do you get a feel whether your peers did well or not? Did you think the test was easier/harder or same as the old PSAT?
You probably have twitter, Facebook, snapchat, all these social media accounts, can you tweet to see how many TX students get 210 or above? Just to see if there are a ton of high scorers? I don’t have twitter or any of those accounts.
But my school is neither a boarding school or an international school, it is classified as a public school in Nebraska. My question was if cutoff scores depend on the state of your school or the state of your residency/home address that you list on the test form.
@Willis1313, there was a young gentleman last year who was in a similar situation with an online school based in PA, and sadly they did not count that as his home state. Can’t remember now where he was actually living, but it was abroad.
Update: This student was based in Columbia, South America.
@Mamelot, December does seem so long ago, huh? The College Board twitter account says “over 4 million took the test”. So I was going with 4 Million, but you never know. You’d think it would say 4.5 Million if it was that high.
Ok. I just went to CB’s twitter account to confirm the number of total testers, and guess what I see a question on there to CB asking about the SI% table. And their response: “came from research study”.
@micgeaux That’s not how I see it. I believe the Commended list is national, while semi-finalist SI cutoffs are state dependent. The commended list is simply the top 50K students among of all 11th graders who take the PSAT test. The way I read it, at 99+, your kid (and mine) is among top 17,500 kids (0.05% of say 3.5M test takers, all grades) OR among top 7500 students (0.05% of 1.5M 11th graders, keeping fingers crossed this is the case) . So if the lowest SI at 99+ is 214, its quite possible (as expected in CA) that you are among the commended students, but don’t quite meet the cutoff for CA’s semi-finalists. Contrarily, theoretically it’s possible that you never get commended but get invited to be a semi-finalist?! I don’t quite know if this is going to pan out in TX or in OH as in my daughter’s case.
@LivinProof Also in CA. I believe this new PSAT shuffled to a certain degree certain students AMONG top scorers. In other words, certain kids who did very well in OLD SAT probably ended up not doing as well in this NEW PSAT. I find it more helpful to ask “Will my score be among top 2100 scores in CA out of 200,000+ Juniors who took PSAT?” All I can say is that here on CC (which gives a skewed perspective on scores), I have seen many good scores ranging from 215 to 220.
