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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of bitter losers here. [/quote]

I don't live in MD, but I feel for the kid that got 1500/1520 and didn't make the cut - that kind makes this whole process seem a bit silly now.  At least in trying to call it national recognition.  Ultimately the system is what it is and that's life.  But one can have empathy.

There is increasingly little money connected to NMF anymore so it's largely about bragging rights unless one was hoping to go to Bama or Tulsa.  And bragging rights kinda lose its sheen when the differences across states are so vast.  And it still has legacy 2x weight for verbal which is pretty arbitrary when they went from 2 section to 1.

It's actually a rather strange national recognition program/process.  Maybe thats partly why schools have been dropping scholarships over the years.[/quote]

It's worth remembering that it's not the cutoff being higher that's the issue -- it's your score relative to everyone else in your state. Likely this test was easier than past tests, which is why the cut off was much higher. If you missed the cutoff by one point, you probably wouldn't have gotten NMF if the cutoff has been lower, because it is all relative.

NMSC sets a target number of Semifinalists for a state. For example, California sees about 2,000 Semifinalists every year, Michigan 500, and Wyoming 25. In each state, NMSC determines the Selection Index that comes closest to matching its target number of Semifinalists. If 1,900 California students score 222 and higher and 2,050 score 221 or higher, then the Semifinalist cutoff would be 221 (this assumes that the target is exactly 2,000). Because score levels can get crowded, it is easy for cutoffs to move up or down a point even when there is minimal change in testing behavior or performance.[/quote]

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