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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=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?[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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