yup, my eldest got NMSF landing right ON the cut-off
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Yes. Maybe mine missed several lol! Unlikely, I guess. It was nice that the practice test said how many you missed, even if you didn’t know the scale. In that one she missed 4 questions and scored a 700. But they don’t show a similar graph so very hard to extrapolate.
Added Texas
PSAT average by state:
US = 987
AK = 1054
CT = 952
IL = 948
MO = 1104
NJ = 959
MO = 1104
TN = 1073
TX = 948
WA = 1024
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BTW, for reference, I wandered over to Compass Prep’s Co2025 NMSF cutoff prediction page, and realized some information I was wondering about was right there waiting to be gleaned out (bolding added):
Compass has crunched the numbers from the early testing window. Approximately 30,000 students landed in the 1400-1520 score band from just over 700,000 test takers. If the number of PSAT takers reaches 2022’s 1.5 million, and if we see a similar distribution of scores in the second window, the result would be the highest number of 1400-1520 students in 5 years.
So if (not guaranteed!) the number of students taking the PSAT this year was the same as the number who took it last year, then we’ve got data for just a touch under half of the population so far.
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I LOVED the analytical reasoning section! It was actually fun to study. And once you got it so easy to get a really high score.
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Thanks for alphabetizing, it was hurting my eyes, lol!
I was curious about the “highest number of 1400-1520 students in 5 years” as well, and why their (Compass Prep) cut-off predictions weren’t then higher.
Do we know how many high schools canceled due to technical difficulties and then never rescheduled for later in the month? How many schools that had planned to offer the PSAT never followed through?
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I guess we will find out next week. If its another 720,000 then its in line with most years.
He is estimating the commended cut-off conservatively - that only another 15,000 with score in that range. It’s not even an educated guess, just a placeholder. He said if the second batch is the same (which is his general expectation), cutoffs will go up. Another 30,000 high scores should push the commended cutoff to a predicted 211.
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if commended increases to 211, do all the NMSF cut-offs rise 3 points as well?
No. Each state’s cutoff is figured separately (though IIRC none can be below the commended cutoff).
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Not really. States with lower cutoffs tend to swing more than higher ones. Think of it this way, it’s a lot easier to go from a 1400 to a 1480 than it is to go from a 1490 to a 1520. I am hoping that will keep NJ at bay…. But I think the Math is really off. Way too many people have perfect scores.
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Right, he simply has found that there is a correlation between the two because at some level the commended cutoff indicates how easy the test was. The interesting thing here is that kids are no longer taking identical tests so there is probably a little bit of luck involved. For example, my D missed an FRQ on APUSH exam that happened to be about something they hadn’t really covered. At the same time, she knew the answers to all the questions her friends got instead.
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Maybe? But there have been literally decades of work refining adaptive testing, and there is some evidence that it’s more reliable, in many ways, than having everyone take the identical instrument.
That said, the first time you do something like this there’s the chance that you’ve pitched it wrong. (See, for example, when the adaptive GRE was rolled out several years ago, and people realized that you could get a higher score with an easier set of prompts by purposefully getting the first one wrong.)
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I just mean you could get a word you just happen to not know but you could just as well happen to get one you know. Same difficulty. In most cases it doesn’t matter, but when you are in a high cut off state, you are allowed very little wiggle room.
Whelp, my “math kid” got a 740 on the PSAT. After getting an 800 on SAT math & 36 on ACT math with zero prep
They just spaced in a question. Like I was saying, at that level there is no room for errors.
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We had 3 perfect scores at our school. If the index stays where it is we’ll have about the same NMSF as we had this year.
How do people here know how many 1520’s are at their school or how many ‘25 kids scored high enough to be in the running for NMSF? Surely the kid’s scores aren’t made public? I have no idea how anyone scored other than my own kid.