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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]    [quote]Most of the numbers make sense to me. Most public schools in the area have a little over 1% of students qualifying as NMSFs. That seems about right to me because NMSFs are generally about 1% of students nationwide, and the public schools in our area are considered better than the nationwide average. So by comparison, a private school like Maret or CESJDS with 5% NMSFs has about five times as many NMSFs as the national average, which seems pretty impressive. And when you get to the most competitive private schools with 10-15% NMSFs, they're sitting pretty far above the average (and pretty comparable to top boarding and day school programs in other cities). [b]And at the very top of the scale you see magnets like Blair and TJ. For those, I think a big driver in their NMSF success is that they select students in 9th grade based on a test that's a lot like the PSAT, so naturally those same students will perform well when they take the actual PSAT two years later.[/quote]

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Does taking this 9th grade based entrance test that's "just like the PSAT" also explain why Blair and TJ have the best SAT and AP exam performance?  Do they also take AP exam like tests in the 8th grade?  Let' here some more defensive rationalizations and excuses please?

I've also heard these kids are simply plain smarter whether they took a PSAT-like exam or USAMO/AIME like exam in the 8th grade -- or not.
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Nobody is saying that the kids are not smart. Each individual kid is smarter than at least 90% of their population and well for NMS I would guess smarter than 99% of the population. It's just that they would have been that smart in their home school also, if you have kids test into a program, they are going to do well on tests. They are smart, no doubt, the school chose smart kids, the school did not make them that way. [/quote]

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