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State
Scholarship Limits Eased
Michigan
among places where bar is lower for National Merit awards.
by Fredreka Schouten, Detroit News, February 8, 2004
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Want to improve
your kid’s chances of winning a prestigious National Merit
award? Move to Mississippi. Or Arkansas. Or maybe even Michigan.
Students in those states can earn much lower scores on the
qualifying test than students in other states and still become
semifinalists. Their peers in New York, Maryland and New Jersey
can post higher scores and still lose out on the prizes.
If the scholarship program used a single cutoff score for the
nation, hundreds of additional students in California and the
Northeast and Mid-Atlantic would win the coveted semifinalist
designation.
“This practice is incredibly little known, although it has
existed for half a century,” said Walt Haney, a testing expert
at Boston College.
To ensure geographic diversity, the number of National Merit
semifinalists in each state is based on that state’s share of
the national population of graduating high school seniors.
States with a larger share of high-achieving students have
higher qualifying scores than other states and that keeps them
from dominating the prizes.
In Michigan in 2001, the year studied, the qualifying score was
209. By contrast, the qualifying score in New York was 217. In
Massachusetts it was 221.
Michigan had 575 actual semifinalists. Using a national, uniform
cutoff score, however, and the number shrinks to 395.
“Kids who are semifinalists in some states would be also-rans in
other states,” said Delabian Rice-Thurston, an independent
researcher who uncovered state-by-state data on the National
Merit scoring gap.
“We ought to know the reason why some students can be so much
more competitive on these tests,” she said.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit group
created in 1955, sponsors one of the nation’s most highly
regarded academic competitions. It helps to dole out more than
$30 million in privately funded scholarships to college-bound
students each year.
The semifinalist designation is important to schools and
students. High schools proudly tout the number of semifinalists
they produce each year, and college admissions officers pay
close attention to the awards. Most go on to be finalists, and
more than half of finalists win scholarship money from the
National Merit program, corporations and colleges.
The program, based in Evanston, Ill., uses the Preliminary SAT —
taken by more than 1 million high school students annually — as
the qualifying exam.
Each year, 16,000 top-scoring public and private school students
become semifinalists. The maximum score on the PSAT is 240.
But semifinalist scores vary widely. Students in Maryland had to
score at least 220 and New Jersey students had to score at least
219 to become semifinalists in 2001, the year that Rice-Thurston
studied.
Students in Mississippi needed to score only 200. In South
Dakota, the cutoff score was 202.
Had the program used a uniform cutoff score for the nation, the
semifinalist picture would have been very different that year.
The number of New York students earning the semifinalist
designation would have jumped from 984 to 1,407. Massachusetts,
Maryland, California and New Jersey would have seen the number
of National Merit winners in their states increase by more than
300.
“Counselors are aware of it,” Marjorie Jacobs, who oversees the
guidance program at Scarsdale High School in New York, said of
the disparities. The school traditionally does well in the
competition.
“We have to be philosophical about it,” Jacobs said. “It would
be nice if all our students could get it (semifinalist
designation), but I do have a sensitivity to students who may
not have the advantages that our students have.”
There’s little chance the current system for doling out National
Merit awards will change.
The goal was “to make this truly a national program so students
all across the nation can aspire to become a National Merit
semifinalist,” said Elaine Detweiler, a spokeswoman for the
program.
Rice-Thurston’s report found that states with the highest scores
also tend to have higher per-pupil spending levels, larger
teacher salaries and higher proportions of public school
teachers with advanced degrees.
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