@Plotinus This page actually says 3.8 million. Perhaps the link you sent only include US test takers and the 3.8 is all students, including middle schoolers, freshman, etc…?
Access and Participation
•PSAT/NMSQT: Record number of test-takers. In the fall of 2014, a record 3.8 million students took the PSAT/NMSQT, up from 3.7 million in 2013 and 3.6 million in 2010
Agree that 3.4 or 3.8 is not 4.5. The increase from 3.8 to 4.5 is easily explained by the Wed administration.
@PAMom21 your correct there was no Saturday test date, schools could only give the test on one of two Wednesdays this year and I do think that was what accounted for the increase in the total amount of test takers.
4.5 million total test takers makes sense if the total number last year was 3.8 million. 13% increase accounted for with the mandatory weekday test offerings? Plausible.
How many of those were eligible juniors - anyone have an estimate?
@suzyQ7
Yes, the link I sent shows 3.4 million juniors + sophomores in 2014, not the total number of test-takers. Obviously also freshman and some even younger or older took the test. Hey, with all that is going on, I am thinking of taking the PSAT myself next year! (Don’t worry, I am not eligible for NMS.) I was just trying to show that, contrary to some other comments, 4.5 million PSAT test-takers in 2015 is plausible.
I brought up the 45k in the 1% only to reassure a student who was worried that since he or she had not received a TASP invitation, maybe he or she had failed to score in 99th percentile. My point was that TASP invitations were probably sent out to only 99.5 or 99.8 percentile in many areas, so the absence of a TASP invitation was not evidence of failure to score in the 99th percentile. I was not making any claims about whether it is be easier or harder to score in the 99th percentile because of the test population increase.
We get our scores on January 7!
@highcoll I received the TASP email, but honestly don’t feel I did very well. I found the test much harder than previous years, and being from California I’m 99% sure I didn’t make the cut off.
@Plotinus you lost me, but that’s not your fault-I’m just having a hard time visualizing “Thus it follows that the top 1% of scorers in the testing population are in the 99th percentile. If the new test-takers are low-scorers, they won’t be part of that 1%. But if more people take the test, there are more people in the 99th percentile. It’s just the mathematical definition. What do you think “percentile” means?”
What seems to make sense to my brain is that there are 1000 orange people in the world who score in the top 1%.
Of that, let’s say they’re already ALL taking it this year regardless of the new bumper crop of purple people who decided to take it. So you get a huge influx of new purple numbers, but none of those scores are anywhere near the orange scores.
So wouldn’t the 1% orange people remain, um, discrete from the rest of the rabble that showed up to take the test this year?
I guess if the opposite happened and none of the purples showed up, it would wreak havoc on the orange peoples’ percentages?
Let’s say 1000 orange people take the PSAT in 2014. The 99th percentile = the 10 orange people with the highest scores.
In 2015, 500 purple people and 1000 orange people take the test. The purple people are all low scorers. The 99th percentile=15 people. Since the purple people have low scores, the 15 people will all be orange. In other words, 5 additional orange people will move into the 99th percentile in comparison to 2014.
If an institution wants to skim off just the top 10 people in 2015, it has to take the 99.33 percentile, not the 99th percentile.
It’s not a mechanical selection of the top 1%. The NM Corp wants ~proportional representation by state. Therefore, it likely has to adjust the percentile cutoff in each state to get the distribution by state that it desires.
NM Corp is a private scholarship organization which gives away privately donated money, so it can select candidates however it wants.
I think what @MotherofDragons may be confusing is (ideal) IQ percentiles and PSAT percentiles. When we speak of IQ, or innate ability, we like to think that there is a true top 1% of the population. This is not the 1% they are trying to find with the PSAT. When they speak of the top 1% of any year’s PSAT, they are speaking to that specific test only…regardless of anyone’s actual ability on any other day. It’s that one day of testing. IF for some reason only average people show up one year, your top 1% will be completely drawn from those higher average scores.
@GMTplus7 Yes, you are right that NMS selection is by geographical area. My example was a simplification.
Given how small the number of NMSF’s is in comparison to the number of test-takers, I think that it is confusing some people to use percentiles. The 99th percentile is not the highest percentile – it is only the highest integer percentile. There is no such thing as the highest percentile. There is the 99.1 percentile, the 99.8 percentile, the 99.99999999 percentile, etc. The number of people in a percentile changes when the number of students taking the test changes.
It is much clearer to say that NMSF will go to the highest scorers in a given state. For example, in 2014, there were 1.6 million junior PSAT test-takers, and around 227k junior PSAT test-takers in the state of Texas. So 227k/1.6 m= approx. 14% of junior PSAT test-takers came from Texas. I imagine this means something like 14% of NMSF awards will go to Texans.
If there are 16K NMSF awards, 14%(16k)=2240 NMSF awards (approx.) for the State of Texas.
Forget about percentiles. The top 2240 scorers in Texas will make NMSF. The number of awards is independent of how many people take the test.
If you line all the test-takers up in order of their PSAT Indexes, and none of the new people are among the first 2240 people on line, the new people will have no effect on who gets the NMSF status. If some of the new people are among the first 2240, a corresponding number of old people will not get NMSF status.
Is there any junior here, i.e. class of 2017? Do you know what is the state cut off scores for the new PSAT?
@MS2015
I’m a current junior
I don’t think they’ve released the official cutoffs, but prepscholar.com has released “predicted” cutoffs for the new PSAT
I predict this next crop of cutoffs will look very different than the ones of the previous several years. The new PSAT has been dumbed down, so I suspect there will be a big blob of scores at tbe high end of the distribution.
@MS2015 Its so incredibly annoying when people ask questions that have already been discussed (ad nauseum) in the thread. Read the thread.
I know that scores are released on the 7th and that the paper score reports are at the end of the month, but what is added onto the paper reports that take it so much longer? Will our online score be in that new score report format, or is that what the paper report is?
Replying to post #693
I honestly don’t think a lot of Asian kids want to go to UA or OU. I think they are prepping for the competitive schools. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt there is any danger of those opportunities being taken over by Asian students. I’m no expert but I think the culture is to go to the highest ranking school they can get into not get scholarships at mediocre schools. I think other cultures struggle with this choice, but not the type of Asian students from test prep tiger families.
There are a ton of kids (all nationalities) who prep for PSAT with the hope of winning the scholarship - even if they are vying for Ivys… its nice to have options. Plus, the prep is not a waste -these are juniors who will be taking the real SAT within 6 months or less of the PSAT. Plus, for some kids its just another competition to win.
I found the National Merit Organization Annual Report listing the number of Semi-Finalist and Commended awards per state for 2014. You can find the table on page 29 of the report here:
http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf
My sample numbers for Texas were completely off. There were only 1353 NMSF’s in Texas in 2014, while I had estimated 2240. I don’t understand what formula or procedure was used to produce this distribution.
For example, in Wyoming, there were 1241 eligible participants (US juniors who took the PSAT), and 25 NM Semi-Finalists = 2% of Wyoming juniors taking the test were NMSF. The Wyoming cutoff was 204.
By contrast, in NY State, there were 142,574 eligible participants, and 1012 Semi-Finalists = 0.7% of New York Juniors taking the test were NMSF. The NY cutoff was 218.
In Texas, there were 199,383 eligible juniors, and 1353 NMSF’s = 0,68% of Texas juniors taking the test were NMSF.
The Texas cutoff was 218.
The number of NM awards per state is not proportional to number of eligible juniors per state. So what is the distribution algorithm? Does it depend upon the actual number of juniors, not the number of juniors taking the PSAT?
Hey people, move to Wyoming! 
@Plotinus Thanks for this! I’m still crunching the numbers, but from what I’m reading, the commended threshold is the top 96% of test across the country - disregarding state quotas. In Wyoming only 1 student (of the 1241 test takers) was commended, meaning only 27 kids (26 finalists plus 1 commended) were in the top 96%. The question is, how do they come up with the state quotas? Why was 25 the magic number for Wyoming?
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Semifinalists