<p>Setting aside the discrepancies among states for achieving NM semi-finalist status, I’m not sure I understand all the hand-wring about the percentages. If NMSF means anything it has to have a high cut-off. So if only 2-3% of the juniors in the country qualify, I don’t see anything alarming about it. What would be alarming would be the distribution, such as some schools and districts never producing even a NM Commended.</p>
<p>Am I missing something?</p>
<p>Worst than that. Many kids got the title Finalist but did not get any scholarship.</p>
<p>mom2,</p>
<p>Our distict does not limit how many times a kid can take the PSAT - only how many times they’ll pay for it. Parents are free to fund taking it as many times as they like.</p>
<p>(Which raises the question: does CB consider multiple results in NM determination?)</p>
<p>I was focused more on what I think are positives: they’re not obsessed with test taking and try not to take time away from learning new stuff to go back over old stuff just to raise a test score. Its bad enough they have to review for the mandated NCLB tests.</p>
<p>This from a HS where 97% of the graduating class goes to 4 yr colleges, including the most selective.</p>
<p>I agree with post 81, completely. </p>
<p>coolweather, my D did not “get a scholarship,” though a finalist, because the NMF funded schools are only particular ones which for the most part did not interest her.</p>
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<p>No. The PSAT is administered ONLY during October, once on a school day, and once on a weekend. It is not offered throughout the year as the SAT is. And ONLY the PSAT taken in the penultimate year of high school – generally one’s junior year – counts. There are very very limited exceptions to this (taking the PSAT as a sophomore, and having the sophomore year be a kid’s FINAL year in high school, for example, or the kid leaving high school after junior year for another), but for 99%+ of all cases, it’s ONLY the junior year PSAT score which can be entered into the competition.</p>
<p>
Of course not every NMF or NMSF from a state is at or near that state’s qualifying score, but it would be wrong to assume that they are all at or above cutoff the highest qualifying score states.</p>
<p>As far as URMs and college admissions, it is interesting that schools rarely if ever share the SAT or ACT breakdown by race, isn’t it? Why do you think they don’t do it? Even though they don’t do it, I’m to assume that URMs are never admitted for diversity standards?</p>
<p>Deja: I think the schools do not want to encourage some minority groups to apply. I heard that in California, there was a lawsuit where a high school known for gifted students sued for reverse discrimination and won. It is just an impossible situation to reward everyone since there are really so many qualified atheletes, scholars, URM.</p>
<p>BTW, in my school, I don’t think that many break the 2200 on the SAT taken in in Mar and May of 2009. Is that similar at your school?</p>
<p>
I have no idea. My son’s graduating class was around 450, I believe. Beyond the val and sal, how many besides my son broke the 2200 mark on the SAT is unknown. I suspect it might have been just my son besides the top two. He took the SAT one time, in Jan 2008 as a junior, and was “one and done.”</p>
<p>A few comments:</p>
<p>1) Making National Merit Finalist status can mean a lot of automatic scholarship money for students. I think University of Oklahoma, Florida or Florida State, and Arizona or Arizona State have particularly generous packages–and probably a number of others. Many schools offer their own scholarship awards, through the National Merit Corporation, to students. It is one of the largest academically based scholarship programs, for which a student does not need to be a total superstar (Intel or Siemens winner, for example) in order to receive a substantial award. The (relatively modest) scholarship offered directly from the National Merit Corporation was much appreciated in our household–and many universities will deduct the scholarship from the student’s self-help portion of the financial aid package, so that it is a true benefit.</p>
<p>2) Therefore, schools ought to permit a student to take the PSAT to qualify. Our school charged students for the PSAT (with fee waivers available, I’m pretty sure).</p>
<p>3) I hear ya, mom2collegekids: QMP and prom date both exceeded the qualifying score for every state, in both sophomore and junior years, even though our state has a relatively low cut-off. They also had SAT I scores of 2380 and and 2400 (taken once, in each case). Public high school. I don’t normally go around posting scores, but the superior beings over on that other thread got to me.</p>
<p>4) I’m pretty sure that only the junior year score counts, unless a student graduates from high school in 3 years, or they’ve changed the rules recently.</p>
<p>5) @marite: Yes, I think this is a problem for families where the parents didn’t grow up in the American system. The National Merit Corporation used to have its own exam, called the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT), which announced pretty straightforwardly what it was all about. They shifted to using the PSAT about the time my brother was taking it–obfuscating its nature as a qualifying test.</p>
<p>berryberry the PSAT is available to all students across the country. The only distinction is that some districts pay for the kids to take the test. Where schools don’t pay for it, any student can take it at a school that administers the test. Mine had a state tournament on our school’s testing date last year and took it at a parochial school an hour away on the alternative date. I don’t understand why that is difficult for people to understand. Even in some districts that pay for it, they do not MANDATE that all students take it. There are many reasons kids don’t take it: 1) They may feel that won’t come close to the cut off, 2) They may not be interested in the scholarship, 3) They may not want to drive a long distrance to compete for it 4) they may not be aware of the scholarship or all of the above. There are many, many scholarship competitions that could be valuable to students, but the students don’t apply, don’t know about it, figure they won’t win. This is NMS competition is really no different and I would hazard a guess that in the grand scheme of things NMS is probably the grand-daddy of scholarships and there is higher awareness of it. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s a pretty nifty competition as some kids will get scholarships and who wouldn’t want their kid to win a scholarship or any sort and it’s good practice to take standardized tests. Every single junior can do this if they want. It’s a choice plain and simple and nothing more.</p>
<p>I think what QuantMech and momofthreeboys just said isolate a key point: the PSAT is not conceived of primarily as a scholarship competition test, but primarily as a practice test for the SAT. Conceived of as a practice test, it’s not surprising that some schools might not care about it too much, especially if it’s in an ACT-focused region.</p>
<p>Why do parents think that lack of participation has anything to do with the state of our education? That opinion I’m not understanding at all. Do you think kids are lazy about finding scholarships? Do you think schools are lazy about pointing out scholarship opportunities? Do you think districts are fearful of paying for and administering the PSAT and not having any “winners”? I’m genuinely curious how you equate a scholarship competition with the state of our education system as mentioned in an earlier post.</p>
<p>I think the idea in the original post was that it was surprising that even among schools where the PSAT was taken, only 20% of those schools had semi-finalists. The implication was that there was something wrong with a lot of those schools if they couldn’t produce any semi-finalists. A lot of the later posts showed why this concern was overstated (ie., the different cutoff in different states). But it may well be that some schools do something that results in better PSAT scores. They may be giving prep for the test. They may be providing a better general education overall. They may be doing something else different that we might not even think is “better” education.</p>
<p>Our local HS has not had a NMSF in the past five years. OTOH, there are kids from tthis school’s catchment area who went to the area magnets. Four of those kids made NMSF S1’s year, but don’t show up as belonging to the local school.</p>
<p>Over 50% of the seniors in the program S1 attended made NMSF this year, and over 25% at S2’s. </p>
<p>I have a kid who would have made NMSF in 47 states but has the good fortune (doubled-edged as it is) of going to school with kids living in a place and with the top cutoff in the country. Realizing last year when he got his PSAT score that he was going to be on the edge of the cliff in terms of qualifying, he got motivated to kick it up a notch for the SAT. Happily, it worked!</p>
<p>How many athletic divisions do you have in your state? This probably seems irrelevant to this thread, but I think it matters to understanding the diversity of high schools across the country. In our state, there are 4 athletic divisions, based on total high school population. Some of the schools are just very small! </p>
<p>I believe that NMSF’s constitute the top 1% of scorers on the PSAT, on a state-by-state basis. (In fact, at one time, I thought it was the top 0.5%.) So if a school is sufficiently small, its top-scoring student might be expected to place in the NMSF group roughly every other year or even less frequently.</p>
<p>Also, let’s be honest here: the vast majority of kids getting these super-high scores are going to be kids from economically well-off families, with high-performing college-educated (if not professional) parents. Kids like that tend to be concentrated in certain areas. At some suburban high-schools, 25% or more of the class might fit that socio-economic profile, while at many urban or rural high schools, hardly anybody will.</p>
<p>In districts where I’ve lived, public school students pay for the test themselves, so cost shouldn’t be an issue for the school offering the test. Students can also pay to take the test at a school they don’t attend, as homeschoolers do. (If the school wants to pay for some students to take the test, they should give it to the top 10% of the class/those with a record of high standardized test scores–the ones who really have a chance of making it).</p>
<p>Regarding different state cutoffs–you are all free to move to West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, or Wyoming if you think it will help your kid make NMSF. Any takers? 
50,000 top scorers are recognized by NM. Of those, 16,000 are Semi-finalists and 34,000 are Commended. Of those Commended students, hardly any of them are from these rural states. It takes a score in the top 3%, nationally,to be Commended. And a score in the top 1%, by state, to be a Semifinalist. But if you are within the top 1% in West Virginia, that may only put you in the top 2-3% nationally. If you are at the 97th percentile (by state) in MA–congrats–you are “Commended.” But if you are at the 97th percentile (by state) in West Virginia, that will put your score below the national cutoff, and you don’t get recognized. I’m sure that someone will misunderstand this, but my point is that there IS an absolute NATIONAL cutoff to be recognized by NM, and students from poor rural states are still at an educational disadvantage–EVEN IF your state’s commended score is called “semi-finalist” in their state. Every year people call it unfair, but they still don’t move to Mississippi.</p>
<p>Even in low-scoring states, NMSF’s are disproportionately from a small number of high schools–private schools, wealthy suburban schools, urban magnet schools, and the one and only (public) high school in a college town (professors’ kids). Among the random rare sprinkling of those from rural/small town schools, you will often find children of highly educated outsiders. True home-grown, local, went through the district K-12 NMSFs coming out of rural Arkansas? Rare as hens’ teeth.</p>
<p>OK that all makes sense. But I’m not sure we should use PSAT as a measure of outcomes based education but that’s just my opinion. I would hazard a guess that the top 1% of students nationally are going to college if they want to and the NMS distinction is just frosting on the cake.</p>
<p>Some more stats to help the discussion.</p>
<p>There are ~4 million seniors in the country, and ~1.5 million took the PSAT test last October – 38% of all seniors took the test.</p>
<p>There are ~41,000 high schools in the country, and students from ~22,000 high schools took the test – 54% of all high schools “participated”.</p>
<p>I believe the sample space is of sufficient size to generate meaningful discussion on aggregates and overall implications.</p>
<p>Based on 22,000 participating high schools and only 16,000 NMSF’s, the average number of NMSF’s per participating school is less than 1. If we have an even distribution of NMSF’s among the schools and ignore differences in school size, then 30% percent of the school will not have any NMSF. Once we factor in the school size difference and the possibility of large student population concentrated in small fraction of the schools, that 30% will increase, but based on the data I was able to gather, this factor alone does not bring the percentage of schools without NMSF to anywhere close to 80% of the participating schools.</p>
<p>Btw, the fact that NMSF is determined per state specific cutoff’s actually made the stats look better, not worse, because the number of NMSF’s allocated to each state is fixed based on the total number of seniors in that state, and not based on the number of PSAT takers in that state. This explains why in some ACT dominated states, the percentage of PSAT takers who made the NMSF cutoff is much higher than other states. It made the stats better because a smaller fraction of the schools are participating and this raises the percentage of participating schools with NMSF’s in that state. I’ll give an extreme example to illustrate this point. If only 2 schools out of 100 are participating, and the state is allocated with 10 NMSF’s, then as long as each of the two participating schools gets at least one NMSF, the state can claim 100% success for its participating schools. </p>
<p>I thank folks for providing various reasons to explain this phenomenon. After sleeping on this one last night, I’m not as surprised as I was yesterday. I still think the gap between 30% and 80% is huge and cannot be explained easily by any one factor. </p>
<p>I am curious of what people think is the single biggest factor contributing to this gap?</p>
<p>momofthreeboys - Yes, of course I know the PSAT is available to all students across the country. My comment was simply addressing several posts here which refered to some schools not having the funding to give this test. I don’t believe anyone should blame the lack of the test being taken / offered on inadequate school budgets. </p>
<p>As I noted,schools do have the choice of having the student pay the small fee to take the test . And as you noted, students can take the test elsewhere if their school does not offer it.</p>
<p>As to your comment about why do parents think lack of participation has anything to do with the state of our education, I believe you are misinterperting the comment. It has nothing to do with lack of participation that is scary to me, but rather the disproportionate results (with over 80% of all schools having no NMSF scholars). That to me speaks to a concern about the state of education.</p>