<p>What were your ACT/SAT scores that qualified you. I got a 35 on my ACT and I know they take the best scores in each state, but will a 35 be within the top scores of my state (michigan) or are there just too many 2400s/36s?</p>
<p>I have the same question. The best I could tell, not that many people in Texas get perfect scores, but I bet a lot get 35s... I "only" got a 34 on ACT (I'm very happy about that, though!). Still, I have a feeling that completely knocks me out of the running. Is it worth it to take the Sept. ACT as a last-ditch effort to achieve a 35 or 36 in hopes of being a National Presidential Scholar?</p>
<p>Hey Bball, a 35 may or may not be enough. The Presidential Scholars program considers the sum of your individual section scores on the ACT, not just your Composite score. So a 35-35-35-36 is more competitive than, say, a 34-35-35-35, even though both combinations result in a Composite score of 35. Then again, as you noted, there just may be too many 36's and 1600s (Writing is not counted) for 35 to qualify.</p>
<p>I was a semi-finalist this year. For the SAT, they only take one-sitting scores. This means no superscoring. They also do not consider the writing section at all, or at least they didn't this year. I had a 2300 in one sitting, but that was with 800 on both Math and Critical Reading, so I qualified. So I assume they only do take perfect scores.</p>
<p>Nope. It depends on what other people in your state (or D.C.) got, and how it broke down by gender. They take the top X number of boys and the top X number of girls by score from each jurisdiction. For the SATs, it was one sitting and no writing section this time (although they may soon add the writing section once there are conversion tables for the 2400 SAT to the ACT and once everyone who is a candidate who is being measured by an SAT score can only use the 2400 test, rather than an old 1600 test -- there are time limits on how recently the test must have been taken). </p>
<p>Of the three neighboring jurisdictions around here, a girl with a 2340 (790 CR, 770 M, 780 W) would have easily been a semifinalist for one jurisdiction but not the other two. If her 780 had been in math rather than writing, I know she would have been a semifinalist in at least two, if not all three, of the jurisdictions. The boys' cutoffs for each state differed from the girls' and I'm not sure what they were. So, it's more complicated than you might have thought.</p>
<p>BUT, once a student makes it past the cut-off, the approach is much more holistic and we often see students who are not the best testers and who don't have the highest grades win -- they tend to be some of the more interesting kids in the pool, ones with interesting extracurriculars.</p>
<p>what is a NPS?</p>