<p>^ This is the thread. High school class of 2010 will be the next class to be curious about this issue.</p>
<p>Since this thread has the correct years in the title, I think I’ll stick with it. Starting a new thread would confuse things.</p>
<p>I just want to confirm something. Semifinalists can recieve their letters by late august?</p>
<p>The letters go to the school principal. How they are distributed from there varies. Two years ago at S1’s school, the package of letters sat on someone’s desk til late September!</p>
<p>This past spring, at a different HS, I had to convince the GC that NMC had sent the letters to the school, not directly to the students. Eventually they tracked down the package. The bulk envelope has all the letters for that school; at both my kids’ schools, the guidance office ran the envelopes for each student through their postage machine (though the return address on the envelope says NMC) and mailed them home. Other CC posters have been told informally by the GC or handed the letter itself.</p>
<p>Also remember that NMC does not release a formal statement of the state-by-state cutoffs. That’s where CC posters come in handy by reporting scores that did/did not qualify. Also note that NMC picks the top .5% of scorers in each state as NMSFs, not the top .5% nationwide. The exception is that the Disctrict of Columbia (and IIRC, DOD schools) follow the top state’s cutoff. There are also different cutoffs for boarding schools.</p>
<p>I expect we’ll find out via the CC grapevine as cutoffs are reported. S2 is right on the edge in a high-scoring state.</p>
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<p>Really? My son’s boarding school has way fewer NMF’s than I expected, compared with other schools in the area. This would explain why.</p>
<p>Hmm…228 in MD. Haven’t received my letter yet (or at least, I don’t remember receiving it…). Should I be worried?</p>
<p>It’s August. Have you read any of this thread?</p>
<p>How late can you take the SAT to qualify for NMF?</p>
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<p>October of your junior year. See page 5 of the linked document </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nationalmerit.org/student_guide.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nationalmerit.org/student_guide.pdf</a> </p>
<p>for a rare exception.</p>
<p>Earlier someone said that there are separate criteria for students at boarding schools. Thanks to tokenadult’s link above, I see that that is partly true:</p>
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<p>That would not apply to public residential magnet schools, all of whose students are typically in-state.</p>
<p>I think he was asking about the SAT rather than the PSAT. The SAT score that gets submitted to the National Merit people as part of the NMF process has a different deadline. I believe you have to have taken a SAT between October 2007 and December 2009 for the 2010 graduation class.</p>
<p>Info from National Merit was that on August 25 letters would be sent out notifying schools of students who had qualified as National Merit Semifinalists. On September 20, letters would be sent out indicating Commended Scholars.</p>
<p>As was mentioned earlier, schools differ in how and when they notify students. But if the school has truly not received info from National Merit by Labor Day, then student is most likely not a National Merit Semifinalist.</p>
<p>So does the College Board ever officially release the cutoff scores, or can those only be determined by the public after evaluating who did and didn’t get in?</p>
<p>Insofar as we can tell, they never publish an “official” list of cutoff scores, hence the reason for these annual threads. However CC posters often call to get cutoffs on a state-by-state basis and then post the responses here.</p>
<p>I speculate that an official list is never published in order not to draw attention to the differing state cutoffs, but this is only conjecture.</p>
<p>Do PSAT cutoffs typically increase or decrease every year.</p>
<p>mantori,
I knew there was a link about the boarding schools, but I wasn’t at my home computer, where I have that link bookmarked, when I posted. Thanks, tokenadult!</p>
<p>Scores vary year-by-year. A couple of years ago writing scores dropped when the CB fully implemented the new PSAT writing section.</p>
<p>No problemo, I wouldn’t have known to check if you hadn’t mentioned it, CountingDown.</p>
<p>IloveAPCal–At least in years past, there has not been an official release of the SAT score a student needs to pass along from semi-finalist to finalist, but the general feeling (based on available statistics and the percentage of semi-finalists that goes on to become finalists compared to average college-bound SAT scores, and given the underlying premise that the NMSQT people are looking for some threshhold SAT score to show a very high PSAT score was not a “fluke”) seems to be that they expect a minimum score of around 650 each in both Math & CR (I’m not sure they even look at the writing score even at this point) to “validate” the PSAT and move someone to finalist status. So if your son had a bad day he might want to give it one more try, frankly not so much as for the NMSQT score as for the boost that higher SAT scores might give him in college admissions.</p>
<p>The combined score sometimes mentioned on CC PSAT threads for “qualifying” for Finalist from SF is 1950, which amounts to 650 a section. That’s probably about right and not usually not too difficult to attain for SF’s, all of whom had SAT equivalent scores above that.</p>
<p>BTW the majority of SF’s who fail to move to Finalists do so because they fail to complete the necessary paperwork.</p>
<p>Are cutoff scores out now? Today I got a letter from my local university congratulating me for making it to Semi-Finalist status, though I had not known about it previously (since my score was borderline). Does this mean people can find out if they are or not now?</p>