Reply to DCPS National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists 2017

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DCPS is really competing on an uneven playing field here. I'm not sure there is much that DC public schools can do to change these numbers in a system that is rigged against them.

Students are scored where they go to school, not where they live. So every student at the top private schools here is competing in DC. [b]DC has the highest cutoff score to qualify as a NM scholar in the nation. [/b]

As a population, these kids in private school make up a substantial number of high-achieving high school juniors in the District. If there was a northern Virginia cut-off score, or a Manhattan one, or a Boston one, the distribution of those areas might be different. But DC public school students are competing directly with a whole lot of elite private school students in a system where the number of available "slots" is small because DC is a dense, small urban place.[/quote]

My child is a DCPS 11th grader who had an extremely high PSAT score in 10th grade...one that, if all other things fall into place, makes it not at all ridiculous for him to apply to MIT, Stanford, etc. In talking to his college counselor (private because so far we have not heard a peep from the school), we were told that he still has almost no chance of clearing the bar to be a semifinalist. It could be a question of getting one or two more questions right, so it's possible, but absolutely not worth prepping for or worrying about.

There are probably dozens of DC kids, in both public and private schools, who [i]almost [/i]make it, and their scores are still good enough (again, combined with grades, etc.) to make it into some of the nation's top schools. In fact, if they lived in a state where the cutoff was much lower (Mississippi or South Dakota are examples), all of these kids would be semifinalist shoe-ins. Anyway, this particular honor is really not that big of a deal. Very nice if you can make it, and definite congrats to the kids who did, but not a big deal at all if you come close but don't make it, especially since the scholarship $ tied to the scores is unfortunately nothing to write home about.[/quote]

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