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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think people are too quick to use National Merit as a shorthand for smart kids.  At our school, the NMSFs are not uniformly the smartest kids in the school and as a result don't all go to Ivies. Increasingly it is more about your high school record than the result of one test.[/quote]
I think NMSF and SAT and grades are all good, but imperfect, indicators of which kids are smart. I suppose it's possible for some dumb kid to get lucky and guess correct on enough test questions to boost his score, or possible for some smart kid to get distracted and screw up her PSAT score. But those same errors can creep into school grades. We all know of examples where an average kid who was teacher's pet got an undeservedly high grade, or where a class rebel got unfairly low grades from teachers. No measure is perfect. And thinking back to my own high school experience, it generally was the smartest kids who scored best on the standardized tests. Some were slackers with middling grades, but they were the people we all considered the brightest. Not saying those tests are perfect by any means, but they're pretty effective. [/quote]

Your general point may be right, but within the tight band that the PP is talking about (10 or 150 points on a PSAT or  100 to 150 point equivalent on an SAT) a single test taken on any given Saturday is not a good measure of who is "smartest".  [/quote]

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