Class of 2022 National Merit Discussion - Scores Release

Art just posted a complete state list on Compass Prep

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SI 224 for Maryland
 that is insane!!! What drives the high scores in Maryland & New Jersey? They seem to typically have high SI.

224 in MD (and DC) is crazy. What happened there?

NJ is 222
Then 221 - CA, MA, VA
but those were always among the higher scoring states

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Is 224 an all-time record for any state? I believe I’ve only seen as high as 223 in the past.

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If this info is accurate, it looks like most states’ cutoffs didn’t change or even went down from last year.

Now I will concede that if AE played a role in pushing up cutoffs, Maryland could be your example. In a state with ~300 semifinalists, it wouldn’t take that many students taking the SAT multiple times to get a qualifying score to push up the number.

The interesting thing is that this trend didn’t hold in a lot of other states, though. My quick and dirty review showed that only 12 states saw their cutoffs go up from last year, and only 3 of those (Oregon, Mississippi and Maryland) went up by more than 1 point. So in most states, the cutoffs stayed the same or dropped.

So if you want to look at a trend where a relatively small number of AE students took advantage of the rules and pushed the cutoffs up outside of the norm, those would be the places to look.

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Someone I know qualified at 220 in GA

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Son got 222 in MD, sigh!

That’s what I want to hear! lol. My son is still waiting to be notified.

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Son got 222 in MD, sigh!

So sorry
 crazy that MD was at a record high this year.

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have you got notice of NMSF? I got 1570 on sat, but have not got anything yet.

Maryland will be the case study for NMC making AE adjustments, if 224 is accurate. The genie is now out of the bottle.

Feedback from multiple sources is that a substantial portion of MD schools, including the county where magnet school are concentrated, held neither PSAT and then held the SAT, specifically advising students on the AE process.

I’ll have to look closer at the data, but this is the only obvious outlier so far. I don’t know if any other state had the same high PSAT cancel/high SAT AE participation situation - I suspect we will never get that data.

(And yes, I had forgotten the “cancel your PSAT even if you took it, then take the SAT multiple times” approach, which only compounded the problem.)

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If the number holds up, it would suggest Maryland is the perfect storm - an already traditionally high SI, a fairly small number of semi-finalists per year, and a concentration of schools that might be incentivized to hijack the system.

I still think alternate entry didn’t play a major role in most other states just based on the empirical year-over-year cutoffs. But if Maryland’s cutoff is 224 it’s inconceivable that the number increased for any other reason than alternate entry.

And let’s not forget this part of Art’s post

As the state with the highest cutoff, it also determines the DC cutoff and the international cutoff. It sets the benchmark for boarding schools in the Mid-Atlantic region.

nope i think we wait for sep 15th

dont complain about AE man most of the people participating in it actually genuinely did not have access to the psat. these anecdotes of people trying to find loopholes is true but are generally less popular than u think

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They could have made more fair by only accepting the first SAT sitting, for example.

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Man oh Man
this is going to have bigger repercussions than I thought.

I live in Massachusetts and while we have high cutoffs
that cutoff is very surprising!

Honestly as a junior I think they’ll keep Alternate Entry but restrict it, maybe with more proof or something, but I have not seen any indication that the PSAT has lost any importance at my school.

have you got notice of NMSF? I got 1570 on sat, but have not got anything yet.

My son had a 35 minute introductory conversation with his counselor today (new counselor) and mentioned that he was expecting to be NMSF
 counselor’s response: “when do you get to hear about that?” :man_facepalming: :exploding_head:

So we keep waiting
 maybe someone higher up will deliver the mail/message. Still the first week of school over here, so I just need to be patient :crazy_face:

Hi All,
My D signed up AE (all PSATs were canceled in our area of MD) by 4/1 date, but she didn’t realize she had to send the actual scores to NMSC. We only found out she wasn’t fully submitted because we asked her counselor. Thank goodness she still can b/c her index should be a 228. How quickly do you think NMSC will acknowledge that she made the cutoff? Will they send to her directly? Or to principal?

TIA

I can confirm that this is indeed the case (as an NMSF from the biggest district in MD). Montgomery County not only has several magnet schools but usually accounts for 2/3 of the state’s semifinalists. At these schools, National Merit is well known because they often have 30, 40, sometimes even 50 SF a year. Many of these students have super high SAT scores - 1500 is average at many of these programs. So when everyone applied AE, NMSC had to increase the cutoff because they didn’t want to have hundred more SF than usual.

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