<p>Chances for a 220 in NJ?</p>
<p>kooshbag, you have a chance, but it’s certainly nothing you can count on. You’re in for a long bout of suspense waiting for the notification next September. It’s unlikely that anything that we learn between now and then will be enough to give you a good idea whether you’ll make it or not; you’re really on the cusp. In the meantime, take the SAT/ACT and start looking for additional merit aid options that don’t rely on NMF. good luck!</p>
<p>Ahh that’s what I figured, thanks!
I wish i got 1 more question right so I wouldn’t have to wait so long to know</p>
<p>I know the waiting is a killer, sorry kooshbag. My older son was stuck in the waiting game a few years back (he did make it in the end, but ended up taking a non-NMF opportunity in the end anyhow).</p>
<p>Ohh that gives me hope!
Btw just wondering, where did he end up?</p>
<p>My son is at Cornell. They don’t give merit aid but are quite generous with their need-based aid. He could have gone loan-free to a couple of schools that offered him higher merit aid but with the loans, Cornell ended up being doable for us. RPI also made him a strong merit scholarship offer that wasn’t based on national merit. His ACT was stronger than his SAT/PSAT.</p>
<p>At this point, forget about NM for the next 8 months, work on your grades, your SAT/ACT, doing whatever it is you do for fun, and figuring out what you might want to do with your life :)</p>
<p>220 in California. What’s your take on that?</p>
<p>Sent from my HTC One X using CC</p>
<p>AtypicalAsian, you’re in the long wait camp. You have a chance, but nothing you can bank on. I’ll reiterate the advice I gave to kooshbag who is in a similar situation:</p>
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<p>My D had a borderline score last year. It’s good not to obsess about it if you can keep it under control, but we didn’t forget about it either. Senior year is SO busy. We worked out a kind of mental double road where one part of the mind is planning what to do if the NMSF happens and the other plans for the other possibility. It is good to have researched the possible financial safeties and figured out which ones are places you would happily attend, visiting some if possible. That list will be somewhat different for NMFs than for kids who have good stats otherwise but not NMF status. So when the word came that she made it, we didn’t have to start from scratch on that. Also, it seems from reading threads on the topic that not all schools are good at following up on their end of NMSF business, or even notifying students of their status. If you are at a school which produces few NMSFs, the counselors may not know what it is or what they need to do, and you need to be ready to give them a nudge if necessary.</p>
<p>All true Celeste and good advice. It’s definitely worth knowing about what opportunities you might be interested in pursuing if you do make NMSF, and we did indeed spend time looking into it for my class of '11 kid with a borderline score. So don’t totally forget about it, but try not to obsess if you’re borderline, and definitely work on a plan B.</p>
<p>207 in Kentucky 
I realize I probably wont make the cutoff and I’m kicking myself! However I havr about an ounce of hope because for some reason I recieved a tasp brochure? Im not even sure thay indicative of anything but im just looking for something to restore my national merit hopes</p>
<p>Kentucky was 208 last year, so 207 isn’t right out of the running, but it’s definitely in the long-term suspense zone. I’m sure TASP has no more idea than us (and probably less – I doubt they bother to analyze past cutoffs for individual states) of what any state’s cutoff is.</p>
<p>I got a 234 in AL, but my school’s so competitive it’s crazy!</p>
<p>Not to defend this system - but rather to try to explain it - I do think the reason for the number of qualifiers “per state” is to somehow account for the significant differences in the public education system in different states. If it was simply the best scores - 90% of the NMF kids would probably be from a couple states.</p>
<p>I think Louisiana was the only state in the nation whose cutoff score did not drop last year. Apparently Louisiana had a perfect scorer who kept the cutoff “artificially high”. I believe there was no perfect scorer in the state this year. Any chance Louisiana may see a larger than average drop in cutoff this year?cutoff last year was a 209. Any chance it falls to 205-206? Any educated guesses?</p>
<p>Sticker, I don’t think one perfect scorer makes any difference in the cutoff. They’re aiming to have a certain number of finalists per state, and that kid was going to be in the count whether he got a 240 or a 230. </p>
<p>A fall from 209 to 206 between last year and this seems fairly unlikely, unless last year’s group was all especially strong for some reason.</p>
<p>I guess I don’t really understand how individual state cutoffs are determined. I assumed they took
The top one percent per state. It would seem that if one of those test takers scored a perfect score it would raise the average cutoff score of the one percent more than would normally occur. I thought that would account for Louisiana’s score remaining unchanged last year when every other state’s score dropped. It’s so interesting to me to try to figure out the possible causes. Thanks for your input.</p>
<p>Sticker: I think you are confused. Let’s assume you are right and that qualification was indeed defined to be the top 1% of scorers in a state and, for the purpose of illustration, let’s further assume about 100 qualifiers in LA (a made up number which would imply 10,000 junior test-takers) A ceiling score would raise the average score of qualifiers slightly but it would not affect the 99th percentile cutoff, and that is the critical number. The distribution could then be 1 score of 240 and 99 at 209 to establish a 209 cutoff. If, instead, the distribution of top scores was 99 of 240 and 1 of 209, the cutoff would still have been 209 in spite of the huge increase in average among top scorers.</p>
<p>(In actuality it is not simply the top 1% of scorers but rather the proportion of high school graduates each state has that determines the number of NMSF qualifiers each state gets from the pool of 15,000, but still there is simply a numeric quota assigned to each state so the reasoning in the above example remains pertinent.)</p>
<p>Looking through the cut-off score histories for the past five years, the LA cutoff was 206 for the class of 2009, so there is precedent for the score going that low in the coming year, too. States with fewer participants tend to be more variable.</p>
<p>Remember that there’s no averaging going on, it’s a count. If they’re aiming for 100 NMSFs in one state and the top 100 kids have scores like this:</p>
<p>50 - 209
25 - 210
20 - 211
5 - 212
(nobody above 212)
The cutoff is 209 because that admits the top 100 students.</p>
<p>If the scores looked like:
40 - 209
20 - 210
20 - 211
10 - 212
5 - 213
1 - 220
1 - 225
1 - 230
1 - 235
1 - 240
The cutoff is still 209 because that still admits the top 100 students. The mean score of the top kids is much higher in this case, but that doesn’t matter. They are just looking for a cutoff number that admits the “right” number of kids (according to how many HS graduates your state has). What the top kid got is irrelevant.</p>
<p>That makes so much sense. Thank you. What a fantastic resource CC is.</p>