<p>^No, it is not an intelligence test (at least, no longer). Do the research. </p>
<p>However, being intelligent, while not ensuring an excellent score, will tend to make all standardized tests easier, unless one has LD and is very intelligent.</p>
<p>Separately, as has been discussed on this thread and elsewhere, the quality of your previous education figures directly and indirectly into results. Often (not always), quality of education is also related to income.</p>
<p>During any other week of my life as a parent of a high schooler, I would have completely agreed with most of you on this subject. But my thinking this week is altered by financial distress, LOL! When my son took the PSAT, our high school paid for all sophomores to take it during school hours. To me, this was great because neither the lack of money nor the lack of transportation to a testing center would prevent any student from taking it. It was also helpful because the exam served as an early warning system for kids regarding their academic preparation as measured by a test similar to what colleges would require from them in year. And for the bright kids, it gave them an idea of who was likely to score well enough on the PSAT as junior to have a shot at NMF, thereby warranting the time and expenditure to take it again. </p>
<p>Better yet would have been if the district had paid for everyone to take it junior year too, but they didn’t. And that’s the rub. By the time my D got to the high school, they no longer paid for it sophomore year either, and the test was now given on a Sat. morning. So I personally know parents, even in our solidly middle class district, who opted not to pay for the PSAT because it is OPTIONAL. One distraught immigrant mother told me her husband had just lost his job, and she only had a part time job. The school had sent home info. about the PSAT and she wanted to know if her D had to take it or not. So let’s remember that there a cost to take it and so not everyone will. Maybe it seems like a small sum to many of us, but it is not a necessity for college admissions like the SAT is. People who don’t have a lot of expendable income tend to eliminate non-essentials. Which does make me ask why don’t they just use the SAT? We know the answer: Because there is more money to be made by using a different test!</p>
<p>Should AP scholars be honored? Same issue but much worse. At a cost of $86 per test, there will be plenty of smart and studious kids who won’t earn any AP scholar designations. My D will be one of them. In fact, I just e-mailed her teachers to tell them why she will not be able to sit for the exams this year. We can’t afford it. That’s no one’s problem but ours, but I resent the fact that several of her teachers have made comments equating sitting for these exams with being dedicated students who are committed to the subject matter they teach. </p>
<p>So, should NMF’s be honored? Of course they should. Should AP scholars be honored? Of course. I only want to point out that we have to be careful about what conclusions we draw from who is or who is not honored. It might indeed come down to money.</p>
<p>TheGFG–If there is no money for APs you should be able to qualify for reduced or no fee for the tests. This is available in our school district…I never paid attention to it but you should look into it.</p>
<p>The same argument about money can be made about just anything, from not being able to pay for music lessons, sports equipment, etc… Many districts, facing shortfalls, are now charging fees for participating in sports. The cost of taking the PSAT or SAT pale in comparison with the cost of music lessons or sports participation. So far, however, I have not seen any move to stop honoring athletes or winners of arts competitions.</p>
<p>The number of national merit scholars has increased over the years (from 2,000 to 2,500). This correlates with the number of pirates worldwide, which has also increased.</p>
<p>Therefore, we should stop honoring national merit scholars. They are becoming pirates.</p>
<p>Excuses: " Often (not always), quality of education is also related to income.”</p>
<p>I have seen kids with all the income you can imagine and they are not passionate about learning or behaving…neither after they grow up…see some of the politicians of today and their scandals…</p>
<p>I have seen kids with not too much income but with the love to read and learn…they succeed.</p>
<p>I have seen kids of middle class or lower income families that since early stages they were taught to love learning by loving and appreciating books, libraries and to be self learners.</p>
<p>Yes, if you are rich you can be in the best private schools. However, if you don’t have the income, you can still make it if your parents have emphasized the importance of learning.</p>
<p>Not too much Income? You cans still teach your kids the love for learning instead of gaming, and wasting their time watching TV for hours. That’s the difference…</p>
<p>The bottom line is teach your kids how to love learning by appreciating and loving books, libraries and to be self learners!</p>
<p>And YES when they achieve and excell, such as any other kids in sports, concert, one act or more of volunteering, Academic Teams…WHY NOT? Honor and Recognize THEM!!!</p>
<p>The writer has it all wrong…there you can see an example, Mr. Rider the author of the article, that sometimes education does not equal COMMON SENSE!!</p>
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<p>WildwoodII, post 118
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<p>I believe Wildwood is arguing for a system in which no child receives individual recognition, in a school setting, for academic, athletic, or artistic accomplishment. I happen to agree with her. If I understood correctly there is no individual public recognition at the school where the guidance counselor in the OP works?</p>
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<p>The NMF and Presidential Scholars competitions are always under attack and their funding is always in jeopardy. They really could just go away completely. This thread is getting very long but I think the topic is important and I hope that supporters of these sort of pure merit academic recognitions and rewards understand what very thin ice they are on right now in our country.</p>
<p>Wow…what a lot of interest in this post. I think there should be some recognition but not in a hugely obvious way. We are from a very rural school system (graduating class 100) and are middle class. Son was first NMF in 15 years and only 2nd in 28 years according to the school secretary. I don’t know what to make of the demographics etc. but I do know a lot of it had to do with his hard work and interest in school. He didn’t care for the attention and basically said I can’t believe this is over one test that I barely even remember taking…</p>
<p>Again, my main interest in recognition is not about individuals who receive the recognition but about inspiration. It may not be a big deal for the lone NMF in 15 years in one school, but it should be an inspiration to others, especially if the recipient is not seen as so exceptional as not providing a model to emulate.</p>
<p>I don’t see anything wrong with recognizing talent and merit, whether in athletics (I intend to watch the Olympics), arts (I have my favorite artists and composers) or academics (I think the International Olympiads are a very big deal). I am dismayed by the bashing of academic achievement. It’s okay not to make a big deal of it in a private school with a $31k price-tag where NMFs are numerous and may (or may not–we simply do not know) have taken the test multiple times after getting expensive tutoring; but to extrapolate to all schools and all test-takers is just wrong. for some students, doing well on the PSAT may be the first inkling that they have a chance at a college education.</p>
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<p>I don’t know who you think you’re talking to with your offensive reference to “excuses,” but I’ll inform you, since you seem to have trouble keeping categoires straight (which poster is talking about which history).</p>
<p>My daughters, both of them, struggled in severe financial circumstances to attain where they are now. Did you read what I said earlier? (No, of course not; you just barrel on ahead.) One was a NMF. (Whoops, that important fact flew right over your parietal lobe.) The other, who like almost every LD-er out there would never have made it to NMF, did well enough on the SAT to qualify for one of the top 4 publics in the country. They excelled on standardized tests because of their elegant private education, attended mostly by wealthy students. </p>
<p>More importantly – in keeping with all the educational data out there – they benefited from their mother’s fine education in what is now one of the most expensive suburbs in the nation, as well as in privates. If you think that merely “having parents who emphasize the importance of learning” is enough, then frankly you are ignorant. Thousands of well-meaning immigrant and non-immigrant parents who have not had the benefit of fine educations, nor who know where to begin to close that gap effectively, do not succeed in transporting a wish and a prayer into enough concrete supplementation to have their children compete in the strata of well-equipped students.</p>
<p>The elements contributing to high performance on standardized tests are these:
Genes
Parents’ level of education, which is way huger than most people on this thread understand
Quality of student’s attended schools
Absence of cognitive processing disorders which scramble data and impair test functioning
Independent student motivation, preparation
Relatively minor, but contributing if on the extreme end of the spectrum can be temperament as it relates to performance – such as exceptionally high anxiety on one end and unusual (inborn) focus on the other.</p>
<p>Mr. Reider works at an expensive and rigorous private high school. I imagine that for many of the students there, NM money is of relatively little importance. I also suspect that those kids know they are smart and know that being smart is a good thing. My own child is at a similar school. We have similar numbers for NM. We don’t make a big fuss, but the kids are sometimes at least listed by name in the end of the year awards ceremony (and , I think, sometimes those names are called out.) For our school,that seems reasonable. </p>
<p>It’s a very different story in much of the country. NM can be a lifesaver for kids elsewhere. I number among my friends a goodly number for whom NM ceremonies and/or announcements were the ONLY time they got any attention. For some , it was a moment that made them think they could afford college. For some, it was the way they did afford college. To not make a fuss in such a circumstance, seems absurd.</p>
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<p>TheGFG, the finances issue is an interesting wrinkle. The PSAT is significantly cheaper than the SAT. At least, what the CB charges for the PSAT is much less than what they charge for the SAT, though some schools add on $$ to the PSAT fee. I know there are fee waivers for the SAT, but I’d think that the income cutoff wouldn’t cover a lot of families stressed about the cost. I agree that for some families the cheapest and best option would be take one SAT test for both college admissions and NM purposes. Other families might like having the cheap dry-run test option that doesn’t show up on the student’s official CB report. If the NM program needed the test data earlier in junior year, that means some students would take the SAT before they were “ready” to do so.</p>
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<p>That’s why they also consider academics. Let me guess, he didn’t make finalist did he? The SAT (and PSAT) measure basic skills that are the building blocks for more advanced skills. I’ll give you an analogy: You can’t run until you can walk, and what the SAT and PSAT do is measure how well you can walk. It’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the point.</p>
<p>Yes (to nemom, CaliforniaDancer, epiphany, and a few others). People are dancing around it a lot, but the difference here is cultural and class-based. The two high schools my kids attended illustrate this perfectly. They were about a mile and a half apart. </p>
<p>One was a private school, old-money, famous for progressive educational ideas and top-notch students. It gave no academic awards whatsoever – no recognition of NMFs, no book prizes, nothing. It did have an athletic award assembly every season. Of course, non-athletes grumbled from time to time about this. However, absolutely no one could possibly be confused about the value the school placed on academic achievement. It was just a matter of style – academics were so important, and the kids so competitive, that giving even more status to the academically successful was deemed destructive of the general community, and something that turned learning into a competition, which it shouldn’t be.</p>
<p>The other was a large public magnet, full of immigrant, minority, and low-income kids. In contrast to the private school, where if you knew a family’s kids were there you knew what magazines they subscribed to, what books they read, whom they voted for, etc., the public school had no shared culture at the home level at all. Everything at the school was done to reinforce one of 5 or 6 brutally simple messages they wanted the kids and their families to buy into, things like “we want to succeed” and “everyone should go to college”. One of those was “competition helps us do our best and get better”. EVERYTHING was a competition, and all that competition resulted in public recognition at the drop of a hat. So of course NMFs were honored – and any kid with the goods to get NMF status was likely in line for at least 5-6 other sorts of awards in the course of 12th grade. Absolutely no one could possibly be confused about the value the school placed on academic achievement.</p>
<p>I believe in our district PSATs are $15. They are given on a school day, in school, but are optional. I think they have up to 350 seats available. I also believe that if you qualify for certain programs that the fee could be waived.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure I understand this. And this is going in a different tangent than the original issue of publicly acknowledging NMFs at a school level (which, BTW, I think is handled appropriately at the original school in the article, since they don’t acknowledge other achievements either.) </p>
<p>These students are being recognized for merit in an academic setting. They may (or may not depending on their personal college choice) receive financial awards for them to use towards their undergraduate education. So NMSC and their partner colleges (who benefit from having higher scoring students in their student body) or corporate partners (who benefit from giving scholarships to employee’s children which engenders good will in the workplace) are helping to support a subsection of high achieving children in obtaining a degree. </p>
<p>We can’t complain as a country that other countries are overtaking us in technology & innovation when they invest in their higher achieving students & we don’t. </p>
<p>It bothers me much more when colleges give full rides to athletes who are not prepared for college level work, who then don’t take advantage of the education opportunities presented to them, and who don’t complete their degree. I totally understand the machine behind big college sports and that the scholarships are self funding because of merchandise sales & TV contracts. But if academia can fund ill prepared students because people will turn in to watch them play on a Saturday afternoon, then I’m not sure why it’s not OK for a private corporation to offer opportunities to high achieving students for financial awards directly tied to education which they have shown they have an aptitude for. And I’m not limiting this to NMF; do we complain about the awards to the YES competition, Siemens, Coca Cola Scholarships, etc.?</p>
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<p>Well, yes culture matters but then you need to be honest about that whole argument and draw some contrasts between say Asian peasant culture and others. It isn’t all about wealth at all. And if we’re going down the culture road, then we should be culturally sensitive enough to ask ourselves if “interventions” in the form of discounting objective measures of academic potential and achievement in order lift up those who don’t register on those scales is’nt actually diluting and corrupting and ultimately perhaps making extinct certain cultures that while not perhaps often producing wealth or PhDs are true dynamic human cultures. If we’re going to be relativists, let’s be real relativists . . .If a culture produces low academic achievement is it really our job to change that culture and impose our own beliefs upon that culture?</p>
<p>Who is really happier - the stock broker working 80 hours a week who has sold out to the dark side or the plumber or fireman or maybe even drug dealer in the Escalade?</p>
<p>^^I don’t think anyone is complaining about the $$ reward, just how it is recognized at any given high school.</p>
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<p>I have nothing against PRIVATE corporations offering scholarships. What I object to is that said PRIVATE corporation is sucking up public high school resources to accomplish their PRIVATE task. Heck, the PRIVATE corp is too cheap to even mail score reports to the individuals – they bulk mail them to the high schools and make the GC pass them out. And, no, I don’t buy the argument ‘a psat score is the first time some kids even think about college’…bcos it if is, it leaves out the heartland which may take the ACT.</p>
<p>I am always glad when our well-regarded public school broadcasts the academic achievements of its students, including numbers of NMSF’s, since increasing numbers in our community seem to be falling for the stereotypical perceptions that private schools are always “better” and that public schools are a sinkhole for their hard-earned tax dollars.</p>