A few million high school juniors and sophomores took the PSAT last week. It gave them an early glimpse at the SAT along with some low-stakes first-hand experience with college…
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What is the PSAT/NMSQT, and How Does a Student Qualify for Preliminary Eligibility? In October 2018, 3.5 million high school students (juniors and sophomores) took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit…
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The most recently released counts for all 50 states comes from National Merit Scholarship Corporation's 2014-2015 report on the class of 2015. Class of 2015 Summary PSAT Takers: 1,595,486 NMSP Entrants:…
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Counselors and families have been curious about the impact of the new PSAT on National Merit since the last pencil was put down in October 2015. Would it lower/raise the…
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When College Board published the initial PSAT concordance in PSAT/NMSQT Understanding Scores 2015 in January 2016, it labeled the tables "preliminary." It appears that they are on the verge of publishing the…
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In response to a post on National Merit Semifinalist cutoffs, a reader asked several questions that touched on the issue of PSAT score "compression" -- the fact that top scores…
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As NMSC began contacting high schools about student eligibility, we learned that the Commended Scholar cutoff was 209 rather than our original estimate of 207. Other data have also filtered…
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This post still contains useful information about the development of our cutoff estimates, but it has been superseded by our more recent methodology. National Merit cut-offs released in September 2015…
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