I don’t have enough exposure to the exams to analyze why, but our school had a steep drop,off in NMSF this year as well. I was quite surprised that a couple of DDs friends didn’t hit the cutoff. The cutoff did rise here, but I don’t know the answer. DD cleared it with a cushion, despite taking zero practice exams and bringing the wrong calculator, but she is skilled at that type of exam, time management, and was probably lucky as well. She thought the math was straightforward, and that a couple of the reading passages were odd or tricky-seeming. I remember she was irritated that one passage was a text many of her classmates who take Latin had previously analyzed in class (it was new to her, and one of the passages whose questions she found weird for some reason).
