P.S. DD is a good student. 4.0… She got 5 5s on APs, but we don’t have any standard test score!
My D1 took ACT April of Jr. year and did a “one and done”. My D3 took ACT her sophomore year (and she’s a young sophomore) and scored 30 on the April exam and 34 on the June. She’ll probably do the March SAT but it’s a bit annoying that we have no idea of her actual abilities on this test till well into January. Subject tests have to be factored in at some point - probably May? Not sure. I was hoping to see how she did on PSAT in Dec. and then help her plan from there.
By the time PSAT scores come out, I will have received my scores from the October ACT (10 days after the PSAT), November SAT, and December SAT II. This is getting ridiculous. Both my SAT and ACT scores are high enough to be a cinch for National Merit, but the new format and the huge amount of time they are taking to grade and curve the PSATs makes me really nervous about my NM chances.
@SincererLove I just don’t know what to think at this point. This change of score release date has really thrown a monkey wrench into things. DS18 was waiting on scores to know what/how much he needs to study before the March SAT during Christmas break. DS20 needs those scores to apply to an out of district high school AND to be able to join a homeschool honor society.
I AM NOT HAPPY WITH THE COLLEGE BOARD!!!
I think the ACT is a good option and If I had known that the CB would have pulled this crap I’d have told the youngest to just take the ACT as either PSAT or ACT would have worked for him. Unfortunately, I thought the PSAT would be best since our family really needs National Merit and thought the extra practice on the PSAT would be helpful.
I agree with others that I think the CB is sweating the curve because the test was just not that difficult (according to my kids at least) you just can’t have it both ways - giving everyone free test prep via KhanAcademy with a easier test and have a reliable curve.
@3scoutsmom Yeah, but how is waiting a month going to change the curve? The tests are already taken and they have the raw numbers. The semifinalist cutoffs don’t happen until next fall. What can they change between now and January? They can’t change the raw scores. I suppose they could change the computation of the NM selection index, but if the raw scores are too clumped up near the top, how would that help? And, they don’t have to have more than 16,000 perfect scores to have a problem, they could just have a lopsided bell curve where the next few bins of scores down from perfect are very large.
As long as they don’t cancel the NM program or do anything else that disadvantages the class of 2017, we are cool with waiting. It would be great if some reporter would investigate and publish what caused the delay. I’m guessing they had to write new computer programs for scoring and statistical analysis and didn’t factor that in when they said scores would be ready in 2 months.
My D was unsure of the answer to 4 or 5 questions, so I doubt if it was too easy, but if it was, what are they going to do? go back to the old one? change it again for next year?
OK, I thought of a problem the College Board could have with the data that could be solved with more time. There are two different PSATs given (two weeks apart). Since they don’t have a lot of experience creating new PSAT tests, they could have gotten score distributions that were quite different at the two sittings. They could be in a position where they need to run some testing on sample subjects with questions from both tests or give the 2nd test to people who took the first test or whatever they do for cross-test correlation.
I don’t think it is just a matter of needing more time to do the statistical processing. This is not a hugely difficult CS problem, and the right programmers with experience processing test data could do it in a week or two.
Question: Does anyone know whether the current/old SAT will confirm the new PSAT score for NM purposes? Or does one need to take the new SAT to confirm it?
@Mamelot if NM cutoffs come out next fall I believe it would have to be the new SAT. Maybe worth parousing collegeboard website.
I bet there is some kind of truth to the comment @3scoutsmom got from the CB person on the phone. There is something fishy - CB is supposed to be independent of NM, but I bet they are not. Scary.
Don’t forget, CB has consistently screwed things up this year. Bad June SAT. Late score delivery in October, stupid choices when deciding to roll out new SAT to class of 2017 mid year (why didn’t they roll it out in June instead of March???) And taking so long to release this PSAT - which is the ONLY thing the class of 2017 has to determine if they are compatible with the new SAT or the ACT is ridiculous. Its another F-U to the class of 2017.
Because of the really high threshold for my state, its very unlikely my son will qualify. Once I get these scores, I’ll have a better idea of it… but like others, he scored REALLY well on the Khan practice tests and felt this test was easy, so we were hopeful. If it doesn’t work out with the PSAT, we are DONE with CB.
I AM HATING THE COLLEGE BOARD RIGHT NOW. They are a business, and are not running their business well. Rule #1 in IT - don’t roll out too many changes at the same time. This is what they’ve decided to do - roll out new website, new data loaders to the feed the info to schools, new test, new PSAT with different selection index scoring. New everything. And guess what, stuff happens - they should have planned better.
Thank you, @3scotsmom, @Studious99, @Mamelot。 @Ynotgo, that is some good analysis! DD still doesn’t want to take ACT. Will take her 4th subject test --Chem in May and SAT in June…
Best of luck, everyone. “Patience is bitter, but it’s fruit is sweet!”
@suzyQ7 I agree with almost all you say–but I see the roll-out-in-March issue differently. The majority of students have historically taken the SAT between March of their Jr. year and the Jan sitting of their Sr. year. That would mean that students applying to college this year would all be taking the old exam, and the students applying to college next year would all be taking the new exam. Clearly that thinking does not work for all kids–including mine–but I suspect that was the CB’s reasoning. (And at least one school has said it will only accept the new SAT for 2017, presumably for the same reasoning. Wonder if they will change their tune?)
Will the results of both the 14th and the 28th PSAT come out at the same time ?
My S who is mainly a STEM kid, took ACT in September with moderate preparation got 99 percentile score in his first attempt. Only issue with ACT is their essay scores (new format) are all over the place for September and October. His writing score was 98% since it was the first test with new essay format and not enough material to practice. He will take SAT only if he becomes a NMSF. He will focus his time on SAT IIs (already did 2). Both College Board and ACT seems to have issue with test scoring and reporting and nothing can we do except advice kids to take them early.
Ugh, at this point it’s very hard not to assume that their new test is just not ready for prime time. Kind of ironic when you think that most people assume that the PSAT/SAT were changing to become more competitive with the surging popularity of the ACT, yet this messy administration will probably just wind up driving more people to take the ACT instead. My D is pretty much decided that she’s just going to concentrate on prepping for the ACT and not bothering with the SAT - especially if they can’t get their act together - but it would be nice to have these scores as some kind of baseline for areas to concentrate on since she was forced to take it anyway.
<<honestly, i="" feel="" a="" little="" depressed="" by="" how="" easy="" everyone="" found="" the="" test.="" i’m="" pretty="" sure="" missed="" at="" least="" 3="" math="" questions="" and="" 6="" reading="" questions.="" some="" even="" say="" that="" amount="" of="" perfect="" scorers="" exceeds="" normal="" nms="" cutoff="" percentile,="" which="" makes="" me="" question="" my="" own="" abilities.="" decently="" smart="" guy="" solid="" test="" taker="" (2330="" sat="" superscore,="" 2nd="" try).="" was="" really="" hoping="" for="" $2000="" per="" year="" to="" lighten="" cost="" ucs,="" but="" it="" looks="" like="" that’s="" out="" window.="">></honestly,>
@ambitionsquared I’m pretty sure my D3 found the test to be easy for two reasons: 1) She was comparing it to the redesigned PSAT practice test (which seemed to her to be more challenging than the redesigned SAT practice tests . . . ) and 2) she was just coming off of an extensive prep for ACT (took last April and June and ended up with a very high score). D3 has never worked on or even seen the current/old SAT/PSAT - only the “revised” one. I have no idea how she would do on the old version - she’s a strong test taker in general but there is no doubt that her ACT prep as well as the Kahn Academy prep helped her enormously for the current PSAT. Not sure how she actually did - I too would like to see the raw scores - but she certainly found it to be relatively easy.
D3’s experience brought to light - at least to me - a deeper issue which many have already picked up on but which probably bears hashing through - please do forgive me if I’m duplicating other comments. I’m wondering if by making the “redesign” more straightforward (i.e. testing for “academic preparedness”, eliminating the complications such as the quarter-point deduction and all the clever tricksy questions - both of which tend to reward more for “test strategy skills” and probably raw intelligence) and providing all that free prep (which the “privileged” kids are obviously going to take advantage of as much as anyone else) CB inadvertently made it too easy for the high end of what they perceived to be the distribution. They could be in a real pickle now. A bunch of those kids would have done very well anyway - they tend to come from families who spend their time on the PSAT forum of CC, for example 
But NOW - there might be even more of them with perfect or practically perfect scores.
How are they going to deal with that reality in terms of deciding NMF’s? Every scenario I can think of has major problems. 1) They can’t exactly re-tool how the Selection Index is calculated - say, to ascribe more weight to the Math section now, for instance - because they’ve already disclosed how that index is to be calculated. Just imagine the PR and legal disaster! 2) If they allow more than 16,000 to the semi finalist level they will need to tighten up the competition for finalist and scholar thus changing the established norms - PR disaster at the very least. 3) If they keep it to 16,000 they may well have to allow higher %'s from some states over others - a blatant violation of the “top 1% of each state” rule - PR disaster, probably has legal consequences too. Those are just three examples of the complications CB might be facing . . . which just MIGHT explain why they have brought NMSC into the discussion (or at least admitted they did till the suits in the back office shut down all the relevant communication).
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Edit/update: @thermom I just read your comment above. My thoughts exactly. Ironic, isn’t it?
@Mamelot Unless they are going with Option #1 - I don’t see how deferring the release of the scores would change anything for NMS at this point. When releasing the scores, they are making zero promises about the NMS contest -which can be tweaked at NMS’s discretion. They can do #2 and #3 later - after scores are released as the scores will give ZERO info on NMS qualifications.
I’m guessing they are messing with the curve at the high end - meaning that test takers will likely need almost perfect scores to qualify.
@cfcsjmishra Yes, the results of both tests in previous years have come out at the same time. Mine took it on the 28th.
@suzyQ7 wrote:
I think this is a pretty good summary of their problems. They are not observing best practices for new IT product rollouts. They don’t appear to have ways to test things built into their schedule, so it looks like they are just making things up as they go.
After thinking about it more, I’m betting that it’s problems correlating the curves from the 14th and 28th that they are dealing with, along with too many high scores, perhaps particularly on the test on the 14th. I’d have to go back and look at the thread, but my recollection is that the kids who took them seemed to be reporting different levels of difficulty from the two tests.
@srk2017 How many SAT IIs does he plan to take? If the first 2 were good scores, is there a point to taking more? (But, I guess there’s usually room for higher scores.)
i think they are dealing with two extremes. I think the kids who are the type to prepare for SATs/ACTs benefitted from that preparation. But there are SO many test takers, even smart students, who do not prepare. My son, who has scored 800 math three times on the old SAT, said the new psat math was extremely tedious, with very minute calculations required, as well as very long reading passages within the math sections. He thinks he did well, but only because he has been preparing all summer to bring up his CR score, so his reading scores were vastly improved. But he said many students he would expect from his school to do fairly well in math, came out of the test not being able to finish either section.
What I mean is everyone on here is assuming the problem is all high scores, but this group is made up of the over achievers. I think the problem is they expected to make this more classroom oriented and it is not. And so I think they do have a large group of students with perfect/near perfect scores, as well as a large group of students with low scores, and there is not a large group in the middle range, which could cause big problems for grading.
I also think it was highly unprofessional and irresponsible for college board to make the FIRST sitting ever of the newly designed test be the one opportunity for this class to qualify for NMSF. I am very concerned that NMSF may not be offered to this class because of uncertainty.