Reply to National Merit Semifinalists 2024

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "National Merit Semifinalists 2024"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The list from non-publics is tiny, 18 out of 158 in the county yowza.[/quote]

A shade more than 11% is not as tiny as you might think. Two factors are in play, though -- there is a pretty big share of smart kids of well-off parents going to public in MoCo, and of the private kids, a lot of the smart-est and well-off-est are going to privates in Washington DC.

This is as good a place as any to note that NMSF has a different cut-off by state, and Washington DC's is historically very high, because it isn't a state. No idea if or when the College Board is planning to change that.
[/quote]

It's not because it isn't a state, it's because they has so few students that using the highest cut off actually gets DC more NMSFs than they would have using the standard formula used for states.[/quote]

DC has five times as many test takers as Wyoming and half the number of NMSFs, so this is not correct.[/quote]

*Wyoming number is half DCs, rather.[/quote]

Actually both PPs are right -- because it isn't a state, they don't get a proportional allocation, but the reason they use the highest state cut score is related to the proportional representation goals.

The number of NMSF allotted to each [b]state[/b] is proportional to their number of graduating seniors in the 50 states (not test takers). California has about 13% of the nation's seniors, so they get 13% of the 16,000 [b]state[/b] semifinalists (~2080 semi finalists, no matter what the scores are). The U.S. has ~4.1 million high school seniors. Wyoming has ~7500 seniors, so their allotment would be about ~31 semi finalists, depending on tied scores, etc. If the score calculated based on the allotment is below the commended score however, the commended score is used instead, so often a few states have a smaller number than their allotment would have been.

From the National Merit Scholarship Corp.:

"In addition to Semifinalists designated in each of the 50 states, [i]and without affecting the allocation to any state[/i], Semifinalists are named in several other selection units that NMSC has established for the competition. These additional units are for participants attending [b]schools in the District of Columbia[/b], schools in U.S. commonwealths and territories, schools in other countries that enroll U.S. citizens, and U.S. boarding schools that enroll a sizable proportion of their students from outside the state in which the school is located. Boarding schools are grouped into geographic regions, each consisting of several states; the Semifinalist qualifying score for students in each region is the same as the highest qualifying score among the states within that region." [emphasis added]

https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/images/gid2/editor_documents/guide_to_the_national_merit_scholarship_program.pdf?gid=2&pgid=61

Not published in this document is the reason they chose the highest state cut off for DC and international citizens, but the commended score cut off for territories. Why didn't they all get to use commended? The answer was that by using commended as the cut score, the number of NMSF from DC and international students would have been disproportionately high for the number of students in the pool. DC usually has 200-300 commended students out of ~4,000 test takers, so 5%-8% when the goal is to make roughly the top 1% of test takers NMSF. On the other hand, by using the highest state's cut score, DC usually ends up at just about 1% of DC test takers, give or take. Also, DC has ~6400 seniors, so using a proportional allotment they would get about 26, which actually is fewer than they tend to have each year (30-50 generally).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics