@suzyQ7, no I don’t think top states will have a 228 cut off. I think that’s crazy. 
However, I do imagine it could be possible. The way I’d imagine it being possible is IF the college board created this test without really focusing on differentiating among tip top scorers. If they eliminated some of the hardest material and/or changed the curve so that you’d have a big clump of top scorers at 228 or close to 228. I.e., if there are a big heap of perfect scores. I don’t know if that’s the case, and I don’t think we’ll know for some months unless more data is put out. If that is the case (that there are huge numbers of perfect scores), then it is possible that a top state cut off could be a perfect score, or maybe a couple points short of perfect, etc.
Having top score states with near-perfect-score cut offs could be an unintended consequence of “making the test easier” by eliminating the hardest questions and/or reducing time pressure issues. (Again, I’m not sure this is the case. Some folks have made a case for this, but I don’t really believe it myself.) For instance, if the college board wanted to make this test more attractive to educators (and students) with more typical in-the-middle abilities/scores.
Historically, it seemed to me that PSAT was really just mostly interesting to NM contenders. In our region, many/most students weren’t being encouraged to take PSAT unless they were both a top student (NM contender) and their advisors/educators were on their game and aware of NM possibilities. Up until very recently, most students in our region (top high schools in the state, but that isn’t saying a lot), weren’t taking the PSAT because, I believe, of these issues. (My kids took it because I expected that they’d be NM contenders, and we used SAT testing as prep for PSAT . . . I wouldn’t have considered using the PSAT as practice for the SAT . . . Why not just take the SAT itself??) Anyway, there has been a shift in recent years towards having all the kids take the PSAT, in multiple grades, etc. Before a year or two ago, the ONLY people I knew who signed up their pre-11th grade kids for PSAT were parents like me who expected and hoped for high scores. We used 9th, 10th grade PSAT as a chance to hone skills for the all-critical JR year PSAT. Now, at our public schools, vast numbers of early grade kids are taking the PSAT and all the JR year kids took it, on a school day, excused from class. Similarly, SAT prep has become more widely available and is free or highly subsidized in the schools. (I’m not 100% sure on these public school details, as we homeschool, but we use the schools for testing, so I do know I am right about the fact that all the JR kids took it during a school day, as my kid took it with them.) Obviously, a company in the business of selling tests and test prep is going to be more successful selling their products if the products are useful to a wide range of people as opposed to only being interesting/attractive to top students.
Personally, I haven’t tried to work out the numbers for the top scoring states, and I have an easier task figuring these guesses out with only really needing to guess at the Commended cut off, as that is essentially where our home state lies for NMSF cut off. (0 Commended Scholars last year in WV, an artifact of being the very worst scoring state last year. Makes me sad for our state. I hope for the day when my youngest, last, next kid takes the PSAT in 4 years for reals, and I hope she has more competition that year than my first two kids have had . . . All that said, I love our state, and the NM kids I know who’ve headed off into the big world have all been exceptionally successful at their universities, including Brown, Princeton, Olin, etc . . . Kids who rise to the top in a state like ours with limited resources can and do perform perfectly excellently alongside those other kids who rose to the top of their own more competitive states. . . )
If I were going to try to figure out the other states’ cut offs, I’d put them in order of SI index cut off from prior years, then I’d try to correlate those cut offs with national %iles in those years, then I’d try to align that with the NM data on SI %iles for the current year. Since there are a huge number of SI scores that are in the top 1% (and even the 99+% whatever that means), it may be very hard to figure out where any cut off would line up within those brackets. I.e., if NY typically has a SI cut off of 99.5%, then I’d want to figure out where the current year’s 99.5% cut off is, which is easy to do if we had the raw data, but impossible with just the big range of 99 and 99+ SI scores. Someone could give it a good guess, I am sure, but it’s not gonna’ be me, lol.
All that said, my best guess at the moment is that the cut offs might be close to prior years. The NMSC and College Board obviously collaborated on the PSAT scoring system, and it would be appealing in some ways to tweak the curving/scoring to somewhat approximate prior year cut offs, so maybe that’s what they did. Who the heck knows?
