2020 National Merit semifinalists in DC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

Booster, you're aiming low for BASIS, and proud of it. The program produced two MIT admits last year, and only 1 semi-finalist this year. Sad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

Booster, you're aiming low for BASIS, and proud of it. The program produced two MIT admits last year, and only 1 semi-finalist this year. Sad.

No school "produces" an MIT admit. They are produced outside of school and are on that trajectory long before they get to a school. The teachers at Walls were very frank about that after they had an MIT admit a few years ago.

[Anonymous]

No one at BDC is ‘claiming’ those 2 girls either. Everyone is absolutely proud of them. Not the same thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

Booster, you're aiming low for BASIS, and proud of it. The program produced two MIT admits last year, and only 1 semi-finalist this year. Sad.

No school "produces" an MIT admit. They are produced outside of school and are on that trajectory long before they get to a school. The teachers at Walls were very frank about that after they had an MIT admit a few years ago.

I don't agree, especially when the school in question (BASIS) started in 5th grade for the student. BASIS does a fine job with science education, and possibly math. It's the rest of the education that I'm not so sure we should be impressed with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

Booster, you're aiming low for BASIS, and proud of it. The program produced two MIT admits last year, and only 1 semi-finalist this year. Sad.

No school "produces" an MIT admit. They are produced outside of school and are on that trajectory long before they get to a school. The teachers at Walls were very frank about that after they had an MIT admit a few years ago.

Tell that to the parents shelling out almost $50k for private school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

Booster, you're aiming low for BASIS, and proud of it. The program produced two MIT admits last year, and only 1 semi-finalist this year. Sad.

No school "produces" an MIT admit. They are produced outside of school and are on that trajectory long before they get to a school. The teachers at Walls were very frank about that after they had an MIT admit a few years ago.

Tell that to the parents shelling out almost $50k for private school.

The DC privates don't routinely admit kids to MIT. The Ivy's-yes. MIT--no.

[Anonymous]

+1. MIT isn't wowed by private school prestige- they recruit science and math talent, period. I know this as an MIT graduate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

Booster, you're aiming low for BASIS, and proud of it. The program produced two MIT admits last year, and only 1 semi-finalist this year. Sad.

No school "produces" an MIT admit. They are produced outside of school and are on that trajectory long before they get to a school. The teachers at Walls were very frank about that after they had an MIT admit a few years ago.

I don't agree, especially when the school in question (BASIS) started in 5th grade for the student. BASIS does a fine job with science education, and possibly math. It's the rest of the education that I'm not so sure we should be impressed with.

Basis’ class of 2019 has some very talented students who are now attending highly selective universities - including the pair at MIT (2 at Duke, 1 at Oxford). Those results may or may not be replicable (I doubt it). One of Basis’ 2019 NMSF is one of these 5 students. The other is at a university that offered them full scholarship.

You just don’t need to be a NMSF to get into a top college. Test scores are just one factor, and junior year test scores are less so.

[Anonymous]

Nobody's arguing that you need to be an NMSF to get into an elite university admitting in the single digits or low teens. But it certainly doesn't hurt though in increasingly competitive application pools nationwide as well as internationally.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nobody's arguing that you need to be an NMSF to get into an elite university admitting in the single digits or low teens. But it certainly doesn't hurt though in increasingly competitive application pools nationwide as well as internationally.

I've talked to readers at elite Universities. NMSF is not even a blip on the radar. They don't consider it at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nobody's arguing that you need to be an NMSF to get into an elite university admitting in the single digits or low teens. But it certainly doesn't hurt though in increasingly competitive application pools nationwide as well as internationally.

Doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t help. Many rejected NMSF students out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody's arguing that you need to be an NMSF to get into an elite university admitting in the single digits or low teens. But it certainly doesn't hurt though in increasingly competitive application pools nationwide as well as internationally.

I've talked to readers at elite Universities. NMSF is not even a blip on the radar. They don't consider it at all.

All that NMSF shows is that you did well on one test. The application has all the test scores. If the PSAT was an anomaly, the other test scores will show that. If it wasn't an anomaly the other scores show that too. The PSAT tells readers nothing they don't already know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody's arguing that you need to be an NMSF to get into an elite university admitting in the single digits or low teens. But it certainly doesn't hurt though in increasingly competitive application pools nationwide as well as internationally.

I've talked to readers at elite Universities. NMSF is not even a blip on the radar. They don't consider it at all.

I worked on the admissions committee at an Ivy League university several years ago. This was not my experience. Schools like the bragging rights to impressive NMSF numbers, particularly where semi-finalists and finalists are Pell Grant eligible. A school will generally overlook lackluster SAT scores for a semi-finalist. When a public school system is as dysfunctional as DC's, admissions officers expect to see few NMSFs and successful applicants. From a high-capacity school system, they expect to see many NMSFs and a few admits.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bummer, not a great showing for DC public, and that's putting it mildly.

In 2017, Walls had five semifinalists, and there have been years when Wilson had several.

DCPS and public charters, with a combined enrollment of nearly 100,000 students, has four semifinalists.

Sidwell, with 1140 K-12 students, has thirteen.

yes, there the ratio is higher at Sidwell. But the Sidwell kids come from MD and VA too. So they're not all coming from the pool of DC students. In fact none of the ones
I know on that list are DC residents.
Plus scoring well on the PSAT these days is often about prepping. Back in our day, no one would prep prior to the PSAT. Today some kids don't and others
do prep for months if not years. It's a different playing field.

Most of the Sidwell kids are, in fact, DC residents - not all, but most.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Those who judge the caliber of a school by the number of kids who independently prep to ace the PSAT are tiresome to read.

My no name high school out in flyover country had 5 NM semifinalist the year I graduated and this was at a time when no one prepped for the PSATs. The fact that there are so few when kids do prep is pathetic. Yeah, people are going to judge...

But most of the flyover states have NMSF ranges that are up to 10 points lower than DC. If DC had a cut off at 215 rather than 223, there would be a hundred NMSFs in the city.