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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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This post still contains useful information about the development of our cutoff estimates, but it has been superseded by our more recent methodology.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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We have received word of a few important developments in the world of college admission testing. Addition of August SAT in 2017 College Board (CB) quietly released its SAT dates…
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Promises and Problems with the New PSAT The need to roll out the PSAT while still constructing the SAT puts College Board test developers and executives in a Catch-22. On the…
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Part 1: Percentile Inflation A series of changes has greatly increased the percentile scores that students and educators are seeing on PSAT score reports. College Board has not been transparent about all of…
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