<p>Are all students automatically entered into NMSF qualifying or does the student have to ask to be included? Sorry if this is a very basic question.</p>
<p>DS2 took the PSAT and was concerned that his scores would not count because he may have not checked off the correct boxes. I thought all takers were automatically entered for commended, semi-finalist etc.</p>
<p>Thank you for your collective wisdom.</p>
<p>I think it is automatic as long as they are juniors. Sophomores, or below, taking it are not eligible.</p>
<p>It’s automatic as long as they are citizens or legal residents and are full-time students.</p>
<p>However, if you son mistakenly checked (or didn’t check) the right box on his form, the school counselor needs to contact NMC after the scores come out in Dec. For some reason, my son inadvertantly didn’t check the box about being a full-time student. The school counselor saw the problem when the scores came back; she knew his score was high enough to become a NMSF, but the indication was wrong because of the missing checked box on his original form. So, she immediately contacted NMC and took care of the problem before we even knew it was an issue. :)</p>
<p>is this a problem that the student can solve or does a counselor have to do it?</p>
<p>There were 4 questions on the answer form (if you have the practice test you can see them on the back page) - they ask if he is enrolled as a high school student, graduation year, how many years will he be in grades 9 thru 12, and if he is a citizen. There is an additional one for African Americans to check to enter the National Achievement Program. If he did something wrong, you can try contacting the NMSC to ask if you can fix it or if a GC needs to. I quizzed my son several times to make sure he answered those questions correctly!</p>
<p>The folks at the National Merit Foundation office are actually helpful and nice. You can call them and they will look things up, answer questions, return phone calls, the whole bit.</p>
<p>My LD DS1 marked that he was a sophomore when he took the PSAT in his junior year. He was never contacted for Commendation or NMSF, although he got something like a 231. (He’s very smart, albeit LD). As he is our first child and going through the college process, I’m sure there were plenty of other opportunites we missed. We didn’t discover the PSAT mistake until nearly June. We also didn’t know about ED, or merit-based scholarships (although he got 780 in Math). We only discovered some of this when indeed some schlorships rolled in. Can’t blame our GC. We all tried to help, but…he’ll have a longlong challenge and we can only tackle so much.</p>
<p>What should we have done differently? I suppose it’s all about being “on top of things”, but he’s enough of a challenge that these “little” things become unimportant.</p>