PSAT Redux

Here's the final segment in this trilogy of posts on the PSAT.

Greg took the test Tuesday in school with the rest of the Juniors. He didn't feel like he did very well. (We'll see how good he is at self-evaluation when the scores are posted in December). I asked him why and the answer boiled down to two factors:

1. he didn't feel comfortable/confident with many of his answers
2. at lunch, after the test, he and classmates debriefed and some of his answers were different. When pressed he admitted that there was some debate among his classmates on these answers -- so Greg's weren't necessarily wrong.

My opinion is the 'uncomfortable' feeling came from not preparing enough. Several SAT prep experts I've read have emphasized the benefit of preparation over an extended period of time (months or a year (!) at the extreme). As you'll recall from the last post Greg spent a couple of days over two weekends. I think we'll learn from this when we turn our attention to preparing for his first SAT test in January.

Final PSAT Preparation

We're coming down to the wire on Greg's PSAT prep. The test is the day after tomorrow. As you may recall we bought the Kaplan PSAT book and the plan was for him to study pretty intensively for the 2-3 weekends before the test. Life got in the way and he ended up with one light weekend and one pretty solid one. He did well on the sample Kaplan test yesterday so hopefully he has prepared enough.

Since one of the reasons to take the PSAT is to qualify for the National Merit Scholarship (the other is to practice for the SAT), I was curious about how the NMS selection process is run. Greg's high school recently announced this year's Seniors who were 'commended' and 'semifinalists' from last year's test. The commended group represents the top 4% of all students and the semifinalists the top 1%. But what happens to each group from here on out? Who wins the big bucks?

Here's the page on the National Merit Scholarship site that describes the process. The summary is:

• 50,000 students are recognized out of about 1.4m total students who take the test
• 34,000 are commended. They get a pat on the back and some recognition to help enhance their college application.
• 16,000 (top ~1%) are semi-finalists. Here's a list of the cutoff score, by state, from past years needed to qualify for the semifinals (from the discusssion forum College Confidential)
• 15,000 become finalists based on grades and a written application
• 8,200 win a scholarship of some sort based on SAT scores, a written recommendation from your school and an essay you write. This is a subjective process where NSMC selectors pick the winners based on all the materials submitted.

The site is a little fuzzy on exactly how much you can win, partly because many of the awards come directly from your college or a corporation. There are some number of 'National Merit' awards of $2,500 that come directly from National Merit Scholarship Corporation. They make an overall claim that 10,500 students won $50 million last year (not sure how this jibes with the 8,200 winners mentioned above). But it sounds like on average you could win is $5,000-$6,000 if you're part of the winning group of 8-10k students.

By the way, Greg scored a 222 on his practice test. Last year the semifinalist cutoff for Georgia was 218. Hopefully he can maintain or improve upon his score -- and hopefully that Kaplan test was representative of the real thing.