This was a topic of discussion among students I know and I don’t know the answer.
Several non-US citizens at S18’s school scored high enough to probably have been in contention for Nat’l merit if they were citizens.
Being that they do not meet the citizen requirement, do those scores “ruin the curve” for the rest of the kids? Or are those scores dropped and then SI for each state is calculated?
I admit, I didn’t spend much time on CB or the Nat’l Merit site looking for the answer. But it did make me wonder how that is calculated (or not) into the numbers.
National Merit corp looks at each state’s data on high school graduates to determine SI cutoffs in each state. International students who take the PSAT overseas do not ruin the curve, and students in the US who are not citizens (or in the process of becoming citizens) can’t participate in the scholarship competition. I don’t know how NMSC accounts for non-citizen high school graduates when determining state cutoffs but I suspect they have some mechanism to back those out and come up with expected number of citizen graduates.
Both US citizens and lawful permanent residents (green card) are eligible for NM. Even the individuals who have applied for the green card, but the application has not been adjudicated, are eligible.
@twicer, not quite. Green card means lawful permanent resident, not citizen; to be eligible for NMSC with only a green card a student must provide documentation for his or her plans to become a US citizen. Someone with a green card who does not have plans to become a citizen will not be eligible.
See page five for eligibility requirements. I suppose a student could lie and say he or she was planning to become a citizen even if that were false, but I would hope that’s not a common problem.
@traveler98, IME most green card holders intend to become citizens.
But you are right, they need to furnish, besides a copy of the green card/stamp itself, one additional document stating when they will be eligible to apply for citizenship, and their plan to do so. Still, this is not a lot of extra work and I do not view it as a barrier to NMF.
I’m pretty sure they only factor in scores of students that are eligibly when figuring out the cut off, there are a lot of 9th and10th graders that take the test that aren’t eligible either that would affect the cut off too.
@twicer, true. If the OP is referring to international students such as those temporarily in the country due to their parents’ jobs (diplomats, skilled workers on temporary assignments, etc), then they definitely have no effect on NM. If the OP is referring to undocumented international students, they also would have no impact on NM. If the original question was referring to permanent residents with green cards, then yes, some of them would impact NM if they are planning to become citizens.
@3scoutsmom, I wonder how NMSC figures out what percentage of graduates in the state are citizens though. They look at total graduates to determine how many finalists they want from each state, but some states have a larger percentage of non-citizen graduates than others. Surely they must have a method to estimate the number of citizen graduates and target the finalist numbers based on citizens only.
That may be one of the ancillary reasons why it takes such a long time to move the process along from April of junior year, when the schools are notified, till September of senior year when the NMSF are announced. If schools normally do not collect citizenship/LPR status (not 100% sure about this), they would be unable to warn ineligible test-takers that they would not be progressing in the process. I hope schools with significant immigrant population are aware and work around this issue with a measure of tact.
Folks who were born and raised in America (including school staff) normally do not understand the immigration/naturalization process and usually think that one can either be a citizen or not. As we see, there are many nuances here and NM takes them into account.
Bottom line, some of the “foreign” high scorers in the OP’s kid’s school can still be in the running for NMF because they already have, or are in the process of getting their green cards.
I don’t know if the students that were being discussed are residents in the process of getting green cards. I do know that it is not due to a parent’s job.
The citizen kids were discussing with their friends, who are residents, the citizenship requirement.
The non-citizen kids were very honest with the conversation. They too were questioning the process.
For the sake of argument let’s say those families were not planning on becoming citizens anytime soon. (I, myself, did not become a citizen until I turned 18.)
I would love to know how those scores are separated, if at all.
Like @Twicer said, maybe that is one of the reasons it does take so long.
My interpretation is that if the non-citizen students have the asterisk, this means that their test has been scored, but not factored into the NM calculations.
Well, sure, the asterisk indicates which PSAT takers are not in the running for NM. Freshmen and sophomores get those too. That part is pretty easy. The other part is how NMSC decides how many finalists will come from each state. That is based on the number of high school graduates in each state (probably the number expected for the year of award, but it probably also incorporates graduation data from previous years as well). Not every junior takes the PSAT so NMSC must get more data from each state. They can probably easily get prior year total graduate numbers, as well as senior enrollment for expected current year graduate totals. But not every state has the same percentage of graduates who are either US citizens or in the process of becoming citizens. Probably CA, TX and NY have a higher percentage of non-citizens than VA, NC, and OH for instance. So NMSC must have a way to estimate the number of graduates who would be eligible if they had taken the PSAT. Maybe they just extrapolate based on the self-reported citizenship eligibility data from those who have taken the PSAT.
Say 50k took the exam in State A and 500 otherwise-eligible juniors reported not being citizens. If the state actually has 100k expected graduates, NMSC might just estimate that 1 percent are not citizens and use 99k as its graduate population basis, and that leads NMSC to set cutoffs to target 250 finalists from State A.
Now in State B, 50k took the exam but 5000 otherwise-eligible juniors reported not being citizens. State B also expects 100k total graduates, but now the citizen graduate population basis drops to 90k. That would lead NMSC to set cutoffs to target around 225 finalists from State B.
If NMSC actually does NOT correct for the percentage of citizen graduates by state, and instead assumes it is the same across the country, then NMF hopefuls in states with higher percentages of non-eligible graduates would actually see a benefit. State B above would have the same number of targeted finalists even though it has fewer eligible students.
ETA: the numbers above are of course for illustration purposes only and not meant to reflect any actual state data.
NM only talks about the number of graduating seniors, not their citizenship/immigration status.
Correcting by the latter would be extremely difficult if you consider undocumented students that might or might not have taken the PSAT, as well as those on temporary visas, refugees and asylees.
On the other hand, school districts and states usually keep track of student head counts (since it’s tied to $$$) and that data would be pretty reliable.
