When are NMSF announced? |
National Merit Semifinalists? Early September.
The principal receives a postal mail notification. Last year our principal resigned in September and stuff got screwed up. Also the postal mail gets lost. Annoying, right? A Commended Student letter comes out around October. Again, a letter to the principal/counseling department. If you don't hear, ask the principal or standardized testing coordinator. You can use your kid's PSAT to calculate whether they hit the bar for Commended. But you need official notification to confirm it. https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&gid=2&pgid=434 |
As a warning some schools are terrible about notifying students. I had to follow up multiple times with our FCPS high school. |
OP here - appreciate the responses will check with the school |
PP. If your kid's PSAT puts them at the right score for your state, you can call the org at the link above. My school lost or never received the Commended Student letter. So I called and verified my own student qualified. I don't think this mattered for college admission. It was just the principle of it that bugged me (culture of not even noticing it was missing). |
There was a big kerfuffle a few years back because they didn't notify commended students. The whole TJ admissions drama was involved because TJs PSAT scores dropped like 120 points and someone said that they didn't want the kids who didn't get commendations to stand out. I think they notified the semifinalists. |
Scoring high enough to be a commended student doesn't do much for your application. It is a really high score, which will help you when you apply, but it is not something that stands out.
I remain baffled as to why the testing centers tell the school and do not directly contact the students. |
Last year our school (private) announced both semifinalists and commended students in an email sent the week of Sept 20th. |
It will be public on 9/11/24 |
I think you have the timeline mixed up. The first class admitted without the test are now seniors, so we'll see what the damage is in terms of number of National Merit semi-finalists and commended students in a few weeks. (It will probably be pretty bad.) In the admissions test era, a super-majority of TJHSST students got either NMSF or Commended, so there's some speculation that they were withholding announcements of Commended to soften the blow for kids who didn't get anything. |
Here are the In the admissions test era, a super-majority of TJHSST students got either NMSF or Commended, so there's some speculation that they were withholding announcements of Commended to soften the blow for kids who didn't get anything. Here are the 2022-2023 PSAT test scores (on the last 3 or 4 pages) The old cohort were 11th graders and the new cohort were 10th graders The mean PSAT scores were 1257 for 10th graders and 1435 for 11th graders https://fcta.org/FxCo/Schools/2023_fcps_CollegeBdRpt.pdf In 2021-2022 the PSAT scores were 1381 for 10th graders and 1443 for 11th graders https://fcta.org/FxCo/Schools/2022_fcps_CollegeBdRpt.pdf That is a pretty large drop off. Scores were slightly higher before the pandmemic These are from this web page: https://fcta.org/ These guys seem to drift libertarian/conservative but the college board reports seem legit |
Very interesting, thanks. 1257 for the 10th graders admitted under the new process is better than I would have expected. Obviously, it's way lower than the previous year, but the current process seems so random that I would have expected the scores to be even lower. |
PP here. I am a huge critic of the new process but mostly because the racist intent behind the change. The admissions process is not exactly random. It is designed to get a demographic cross section of the applicant pool but it doesn't entirely remove merit. The essays are in fact difficult to complete within the allotted time but picking STEM students based on writing and verbal ability is a bit like choosing a basketball team based on batting averages. You'll still end up with athletes but maybe not even the best baseball players and maybe not the best filter for picking a basketball team. If you took the PSAT scores from just the honors students at places like woodson, mclean and langley, I would bet you end up with a PSAT score pretty close to the TJ score. I do like the economic diversity (and the racial diversity that comes with it). It always rubbed me the wrong way that TJ mostly admitted kids that could afford private school. But reducing merit as a filter in order to avoid selecting too many asians seemed pretty racist to me. If they reintroduced testing and kept the 1.5% quota I think you would see better results. |
Can we ask for the list now? |
Why is this so complicated? They should post the state cutoff numbers on this thing called the Internet as soon as they have them. |