My oldest was a 2015 NMF and was awarded the $2500 that he applied to his tuition at MIT. He scored a 227 on the PSAT and never received a TASP invitation.
I would not read anything into not receiving the TASP invitation.
@SuzyQ, there are only 2500 National Merit Scholars. The other scholarships are administered but not provided by National Merit. They are not open to the entire pool of finalists, only to those who attend certain colleges or whose parents work for certain companies. Some of them are open to NMSF who didn’t make NMF. So if you are trying to estimate how many NMSF or NMF are attending different colleges, you cannot compare using the latter two scholarships, particularly the school-sponsored ones. Some colleges will award scholarships to all their NMF or NMSF, whereas others don’t. That’s why schools like University of Alabama appear to have comparable numbers of such students to the Ivy league schools. Many of the NMSF attending Yale or other schools are not counted in the reports because they didn’t receive any money. The corporate scholar recipients are going to be skewed geographically. I don’t know where they are most common but it isn’t going to be an even distribution and I don’t think there is an easy way to correct for this.
@EarlVanDorn stated “Half of NMF receive merit scholarships, and so the college they attend is tracked. According to the 2013-14 Annual Report, 180 Merit Award recipients attended Yale. Five or six schools beat out Yale, including Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Standord, Oklahoma, U. California, and Vanderbilt.” Yes, but some of these schools give out the college-sponsored scholarships, Oklahoma and if I recall Northwestern gives a smallish award. Yale doesn’t so you need to correct their numbers for those who aren’t counted.
oops, wrong thread!!!
To be honest have not paid much attention to NMS because my oldest kid does not qualify. My husband was a NMS back in the day and received a corporate sponsored NM scholarship with was about double the standard amount, and then a seperate college scholarship covering the remainder of tuition.
I had always assumed that the “real value” of the award is not the monetary amount (because let’s face it $2000/$2500 is paltry and barely covers the cost of books at an elite upper tier school) but that status of being a recipient and the fact that most schools then really want you because NMS are viewed as high achieving. I assumed that the school then decided to give NM scholars additional school related scholarships based on having received the distinction. How much do the college sponsored NM scholarships top out at? I thought about $5000? From what someone said above that is the one most are clamoring for, the college NM scholarships.
At our house the PSAT simply is an opportunity to practice the SAT. Sad but true.
That’s what it is for most people, @labegg. And I agree with you 100% on the real value of NMS. BTW, there are some colleges that give a lot more than $5,000 - UMN, for instance, gives first preference for it’s $10,000 Gold Award to NMF’s.
Funny, my D was a NMF and it wasn’t about the prestige at all, but about the $$, and by that I mean the schools that offer way more that $2500 or even $10K. I’m talking about the big awards given by the likes of Alabama and UK. Those were automatic financials safeties.
@labegg the official college sponsored NM scholarship tops out at $5000 but there are many schools that will offer NMF up to full rides. My D16 is NMSF and likely NMF she intends to go to the University of Oklahoma and their OOS National Merit package is $124,000 (http://www.ou.edu/content/dam/recruitment/scholarships/NMpackage_2016_NonRes.pdf) and you can stack additional private and departmental scholarships on top of that. S18 who I believe has the potential to be NM also is looking at UT Dallas they offer in state $100,000 and OOS $178,000. Other schools with big awards are University of Kentucky, University of Central Florida, University of Alabama.
Some schools also offer intangible perks like early registration, auto admit to honors programs… OU has an entire office devoted to National Merit students that will help the with any college problem and provides unlimited advising.
Also, some schools like Vanderbilt enjoy having large numbers of NMFs as a prestige thing. They give $5000/year just for National Merit and also had by far!! the best FA offer my brother received.
Anyone on this thread applying to TASP?
Where does it say on the NMS that there are only 2500 National Merit Designees? That is not what I see, and this has been discussed on this forum before. I believe it says there are 7500 kids that win 3 different types of awards, the $2500, corporate winners, and college sponsored winners. The remaining 7500 did not get chosen for the $2500 award, and did not attend a college that is a sponsor nor did not have a relationship with the listed corporations.
The college sponsored is where the big money is - 30K at Northeaster, 20K Boston University, 20K+ Fordham, University of Alabama, etc… $2500 is not the reason most of us are on this thread every day watching for news of these scores.
TASP email says “As one of the top PSAT/NMSQT scorers in your area, you were identified as a promising candidate xxxxxx”. Therefore, I believe @Plotinus is correct on the cutoff – I know three friends whose kids are NMFs and never heard about TASP.
@nw2this , DD is applying it…and some other competitive FREE programs.
There are
“2,500 single-payment National Merit $2500 Scholarships for which all Finalists will be considered;
•
about 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for which Finalists who meet a company or busi-
ness grantor’s specified criteria will be considered; and
•
some 3,900 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for which only Finalists who will attend their
respective sponsor institutions are considered”
My point is just that you cannot estimate the number of NMSF or commended by looking at the number of “National Merit Scholars” because some schools will report the NMSF they choose to give scholarships to as “National Merit Scholars” and others aren’t doing this. Schools like Vanderbilt are creating their own “National Merit Scholars”.
i got the brown and tasp email but not the stanford one.
i don’t think its based on last year’s psat scores b/c i scored a 189 which is low af
this year though, im quite confident that i did significantly better (b/c i actually studied lol)
From the College Board web page on the Student Search Service:
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/psat-nmsqt-psat-10/scores/who-receives-scores
“By opting in, you authorize the College Board to provide colleges and scholarship organizations with limited personal information. Institutions may use this information to select students within a range of scores, but they do not receive individual test scores, grades, telephone numbers, or Social Security numbers.”
While colleges and most scholarship programs DON’T get the actual PSAT scores, it looks as though National Merit Scholarship Corporation and Telluride Association DO get the actual PSAT scores, and not just the email addresses of students who fall into a certain score range:
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/psat-nmsqt-psat-10/scores/who-receives-scores
"The College Board sends PSAT/NMSQT scores to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC), the test’s cosponsor. Learn about the National Merit® Scholarship Program, an academic competition for recognition and scholarships.
Other Programs
PSAT/NMSQT scores are automatically sent to these scholarship and recognition programs:
National Hispanic Recognition Program
National Scholarship Service
Telluride Seminar Scholarships
Learn more about these programs. If you don’t want your scores released to these organizations, write to the PSAT/NMSQT program by Oct. 31 at this address:
P.O. Box 6720
Princeton, NJ 08541-6720"
Since Telluride Association is supposed to get the actual PSAT scores, not just personal information, and TA is sending out invitations, it is likely that the debate is over which score bands are “on track”, “almost on track” and “deficient” for the various areas and sub-areas. A lot of debate over this suggests that the median and 30/40 percentile scores are low, especially among specific student populations (as we would have expected from Common Core test results).
While I understand that the “on track” determinations are politically charged, I don’t think it is right, fair, or possibly even legal for CB to withhold scores from students just because CB has not yet decided which scores count as “on track”. Calling the “on track” determination an “enhanced score” is preposterous. This determination is not a score. It is an opinion about whether the score indicates college readiness. Parents, students, and college admissions officers can also form their own opinions about which score shows readiness for which college. It is highly unlikely that all the different stakeholders from all the different parts of the country and populations will reach unanimity on this issue.
If the 2015 PSAT scores are available to give to Telluride Association, why are they not available to give to the students who paid for and took the test? Does not CB have a professional, moral, as well as contractual obligation to provide these scores by the promised date, especially if these scores were computed by the promised date, and sent out to Telluride Association by the promised date? Could the scores not be sent out on the promised date, and the determination as to which scores are “on track” left for the politicos to wrangle over?
This is my point exactly, @plotinus, and I would think someone who has received that TASP e-mail has cause to contact CB about this. It’s unethical at best for CB to be releasing someone’s results with other agencies and not the party who paid for and took the exam.
@Mamelot Yes, you were completely right. Until I read the CB website carefully, I did not realize that CB is supposed to send Telluride Association the actual scores, so I thought maybe the curve had not yet been finalized. This is really egregious.
based on the link plotinus shared, the emails from stanford, brown et al are not indicative of a high score:
“The College Board does not send PSAT/NMSQT or PSAT 10 scores to colleges”
The evidence is high that CB has honored certain deadlines to key players in the academic industry at the expense of their student clientele. And that CB considers score information to be THEIR property (not yours) to be released to whichever party at whatever time THEY deem appropriate. I’m not sure that’s exactly the relationship they profess to have with their student clientele. Someone is welcome to correct me but I thought they were supposed to be providing a service not controlling the release of your information. Deadlines are deadlines.
“It’s unethical at best for CB to be releasing someone’s results with other agencies and not the party who paid for and took the exam.” Most of the students taking the PSAT did not pay for it. Their schools did. Our school requires it of all sophomores and juniors and therefore the school has to pay for it. It seems to be required of many more students this year.
Even so, our school sits on the scores until late January, which is quite frustrating. It’s no excuse for the college board–they can always release detailed scoring electronically later when they have whatever analysis they care to use completed. I couldn’t care less about their analysis, I think it’s way overstating sweeping conclusions from breakdown of a few multiple choice questions and I doubt most people do either. It’s rather silly to hold up this test as a measure of college readiness which somehow the student, teachers, and school were previously totally unaware of before the college board told them what to think. But I am happy that despite this delay, we will get them several weeks earlier this year.