How many people get into the 99th percentile? Is it very common?
15000 nationwide
It is probably more common at CC than among the general population!
15,000 is incorrect. There are 16,000 national merit semifinalists.
The number of people in 99th percentile is about 35,000.
In comparison, the total freshmen enrolled at the Ivy Leagues + Stanford + MIT is also about 16,000.
LOL… 1% of test takers are in the 99.0 percentile. NMSC will award around 16,000 NMSF designations to the approximately 1.5MM test takers. So slightly more than 1% will be chose for NMSF.
NMSC will award about 50,000 total commended and NMSF awards. You have to be around the 97 percentile nationally to get commended status.
The 99th percentile contains the top 1% of scorers. So the number of people in the 99th percentile equals 1% of the total number of people taking the test.
The 99th percentile for juniors equals 1% of juniors taking the test. In 2014, around 1.6 million juniors took the test, so the 99th percentile for juniors was around 16,000.
This year more people took the test, so the numbers will be correspondingly higher.
Just to be clear, the PSAT reports both a “national” percentile and a “user” percentile. The “user” percentile is based on people actually taking the test - which is most useful for NMSF prediction (and also likely lower). The “national” percentile is an estimate of where you would be compared to all eligible juniors, whether they take the test or not. (Presumably the people that don’t take the test would do much worse than average if they were forced to take it, which is why the user percentile will be less than or equal to the national percentile for most scores.)