<p>Does anyone know when in April you find out if you made the first cut for National Merit?</p>
<p>I was wondering exactly that. The NMSC’s website says “early april”.</p>
<p>We got our PSAT commended letters when we went back to school in September.</p>
<p>In late April, National Merit notifies those who took the PSAT last October if they made at least the commended cutoff. You won’t find out until August/September if you are semifinalist or commended.</p>
<p>How do they notify us? Directly or through our schools?</p>
<p>Most of the notifications are through school, but one does come directly home - I think it was the scholarship notification (spring of senior year).</p>
<p>What’s the difference between semifinalist and commended? Like…how do you get to seminfinalist standing?</p>
<p>So we should be notified soon right? About whether we made the commended cutoff?</p>
<p>How high do you have to get to get commended??</p>
<p>mcvcm92
commended is like over 200
semifinalist like ~217 or up</p>
<p>commended is top 5% nationally which I think is closer to 210 than 200. And semifinalist depends on state, so it will be much harder to be a semifinalist in california than in alabama.</p>
<p>Commended is usually around 200, not closer to 210. In fact, the past few years, several states’ NMSF qualifying score were quite a bit closer to 200 than 210.</p>
<p>Is there much chance of the California cutoff for semifinalist going above a 220 or so?</p>
<p>I got a 198 and scored higher than 96%. But it is like top 50,000 scorers out of scholarship eligible test takers I think. so if you scored higher than 97% you should have it and, some that scored higher than 96% might get it. But it will probably be higher than 200 this year, right around that still though.</p>