Fall 2013 DC Private School National Merit Semifinalists (Class of 2014)

[Anonymous]

I was a semifinalist in the 80s but I don't remember it being a big deal or helping with a scholarship in any way. I wasn't a finalist so it didn't seem important, really.

[Anonymous]

What's up with NCS. Same gene pool as STA's. So numbers are very surprising.

[Anonymous]

I was surprised by Richard Montgomery -- most semifinalists ever, and way above their average number of semifinalists. Must be serving brain food in the cafeteria now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was surprised by Richard Montgomery -- most semifinalists ever, and way above their average number of semifinalists. Must be serving brain food in the cafeteria now.

It's a magnet school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was surprised by Richard Montgomery -- most semifinalists ever, and way above their average number of semifinalists. Must be serving brain food in the cafeteria now.

It's a magnet school.

Sure, but it was a magnet school last year and the year before too. The big jump this year was surprising. Likely an anomaly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And here's a list that has the private schools in Montgomery County. None at Bullis, one at Landon, three at Holton, two at Georgetown Prep, seven at Charles E. Smith:

http://connectedcommunities.us/showthread.php?t=57593

For those who don't open the attachments, a number of other schools in Montgomery Country also matched Landon's one - St. Andrew's, Stone Ridge, and a number of others that don't get much attention on DCUM.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm actually shocked that the numbers are so low (or as expensive as these schools are and how "elite" their students are supposed to be).

I'm not surprised. When you really look at the numbers and think about it, one of the reasons the numbers in DC privates is relatively high -- not low -- is that the public schools historically were not viewed as good alternatives for strong students. The Montgomery County NMSF numbers in privates tends to be lower than DC privates because of the availability of both magnets and publics that are perceived as strong options. I suspect that Charles E. Smith tends to be the highest in MoCo because more families that elect that school are doing so because they want the Judaic curriculum that is not available in public school, but if you look at other privates the numbers are lower.

The other reason the privates numbers are not higher is because the numbers validate that most DC-area privates do not pretend to really be exclusively about the best and brightest as defined by test scores (even if parents want to think otherwise). Magnet programs generally accept students based almost entirely upon test scores and/or previous grades. In MoCo, for example, I believe they are permitted to consider gender but not any other type of diversity -- at least that was the rule for the middle school magnets when I attended open houses. Moreover, I don't believe anyone has an edge at the magnets based on his/her ability to play a sport, sing opera, act, or play an instrument, or based on legacy status, high profile parents, ability to make substantial contributions to the school, etc. I am not suggesting these are necessarily bad things -- private schools can't function without revenues and you can't have a sports team or a band without a certain number of students willing and able to play -- but the magnet school and private school experiences are just very different in ways outside of the purely academic realm.

[Anonymous]

Probably silly question -- but if you live in one jurisdiction, but attend school in another, are you eligible? i.e., are VA students who attend private school in DC eligible? and is it based on DC's threshold or VA's threshold?

[Anonymous]

Why does this matter at all? I've never seen ANY correlation of national merit scholar status to career success. College placement is plainly a better indicator of student success.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why does this matter at all? I've never seen ANY correlation of national merit scholar status to career success. College placement is plainly a better indicator of student success.

A quick google reveals several studies that find a correlation. Here is one ...

... In other words, these results provide evidence for the validity of the NMSP selection process in that students who advance to higher levels of recognition earn higher
grades in college. ... In summary, the results indicate that National Merit Scholarship Program recognition levels are positively related to both FYGPA and retention to the second year of college. Not only do the mean FYGPA and second-year retention rates follow an increasing trend as recognition level increases, but there are also statistically signi?cant differences between recognition levels, and each difference comparison was associated with a small-to-medium effect size.
http://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/researchreport-2011-10-college-performance-national-merit-scholarship-recognition.pdf

Admittedly, that's a study funded by the College Board, but they have the most interest in studying the particular question, so it makes sense they would fund the research.

[Anonymous]

I'm actually shocked that the numbers are so low (or as expensive as these schools are and how "elite" their students are supposed to be).

I think this is a pretty unfair assessment. The top 1% of DC is going to be a smaller number of kids than the top 1% of VA or MD just because the population of kids in DC is smaller. On top of that, the top private schools are fairly small compared to public schools on average.

Plus, I think kids who score in the top 2% or 5% or whatever by and large are just as smart as the top 1% NMSF, maybe they just don't test as well or maybe they didn't prep for the PSAT because aside from NSMF, it doesn't go on their record at all and scoring poorly on that test has virtually no stakes in their future. Or whatever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Probably silly question -- but if you live in one jurisdiction, but attend school in another, are you eligible? i.e., are VA students who attend private school in DC eligible? and is it based on DC's threshold or VA's threshold?

I am pretty certain it is by school, not state of residence. Not a huge deal as both Virginia and Maryland have pretty high cut-off scores as well (DC's was 2 points higher than VA and 1 point higher than MD) but can be enough to keep a few kids on the outside looking in. There is a separate category for New England Boarding schools as well, by the way, which also supports the understanding that qualification is based upon school, not home state.

Every year people debate/discuss why DC's cut-off score is set to equal the highest state score. Remember that the National Merit Scholarship group is an organization with their own goals, etc. They set this up to have a proportional amount of winners from throughout the USA, as otherwise it would be dominated by students from the East and West Coasts.

It doesn't really "matter" in the scheme of things, of course. The most direct relevance to the Independent School forum is probably that it can give you a proxy for the strength of the academic cohort at the school, with all due caveats for the fact that standardized tests don't capture all types of intelligence or achievement. For example, it's not unfair to look at these results and postulate that St. Albans may be more of an academic environment in some ways than Landon or Prep. Most people don't need NMSFs to get a sense for that sort of thing, so it's to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

But given how often people argue about how rigorous school A or B is, this is one of the few metrics that is out there for all the schools, so it is interesting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm actually shocked that the numbers are so low (or as expensive as these schools are and how "elite" their students are supposed to be).

Most of the numbers make sense to me. Most public schools in the area have a little over 1% of students qualifying as NMSFs. That seems about right to me because NMSFs are generally about 1% of students nationwide, and the public schools in our area are considered better than the nationwide average. So by comparison, a private school like Maret or CESJDS with 5% NMSFs has about five times as many NMSFs as the national average, which seems pretty impressive. And when you get to the most competitive private schools with 10-15% NMSFs, they're sitting pretty far above the average (and pretty comparable to top boarding and day school programs in other cities). And at the very top of the scale you see magnets like Blair and TJ. For those, I think a big driver in their NMSF success is that they select students in 9th grade based on a test that's a lot like the PSAT, so naturally those same students will perform well when they take the actual PSAT two years later.

[Anonymous]

How many of the STA semifinalists came from Beauvoir?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm actually shocked that the numbers are so low (or as expensive as these schools are and how "elite" their students are supposed to be).

Most of the numbers make sense to me. Most public schools in the area have a little over 1% of students qualifying as NMSFs. That seems about right to me because NMSFs are generally about 1% of students nationwide, and the public schools in our area are considered better than the nationwide average. So by comparison, a private school like Maret or CESJDS with 5% NMSFs has about five times as many NMSFs as the national average, which seems pretty impressive. And when you get to the most competitive private schools with 10-15% NMSFs, they're sitting pretty far above the average (and pretty comparable to top boarding and day school programs in other cities). And at the very top of the scale you see magnets like Blair and TJ. For those, I think a big driver in their NMSF success is that they select students in 9th grade based on a test that's a lot like the PSAT, so naturally those same students will perform well when they take the actual PSAT two years later.

Good analysis.