Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment PSAT 9th

I'm not familiar with the PSAT-8 etc, so I'm not sure if taking it provides worthwhile prep for the PSAT taken for NMSF qualifying. Our school district lets sophomores take the qualifying PSAT as a practice run in sophomore year if students want prep, but my perspective on that (which is extremely limited to a very small sample lol!) was that it didn't really change the outcome of who landed where in terms of top percentiles - the kids who were going to score in the 98th-99th percentiles scored there, whether or not they took the practice test.


A semi-finalist doesn't actually receive a National Merit Scholarship... but scoring well does get your child on a lot of lists to receive information from colleges who will be excited to have your child apply, and that in turn can lead to a potentially large scholarship etc. Our ds was a NM finalist but few of the colleges he was interested in attending actually offered actual NM scholarships, and the ones that did had highly competitive admissions with all-around high PSAT and SAT scores as well as great GPAs - so in order to stand out an applicant needed more of something unique and different. My ds ended up attending a school that doesn't support NM scholarships but did send an auto-invite to apply when they received his PSAT scores... there were several invitations like that, where a student was given opportunities to apply without going through letters of recommendation etc unless they wanted to include additional info. DS got a great scholarship to a great college that he was one of his top choices so all an all-around win. On the flip side, I think the same would have happened with his SAT scores if he'd never taken the PSAT.

Re test prep for college, I'd take advantage of anything you can get at no cost through school if your girls want to do the prep, but if you're paying for prep or if your girls have limited time or patience for test prep, I'd focus on either SAT or ACT - those are tests you can improve scores on through prep courses. My ds wasn't interested in taking the PSAT test as practice as a sophomore and he still scored high enough to. e a finalist. I have a junior again this year who is very likely not to score high enough for NM, but we are having her take the test simply as practice for sitting through a standardized test in the same environment she'll have to take the SAT or ACT in later this year - not because exposure to the actual test will help with SAT but because she gets anxious when testing and for kids who have worries about time or performance etc that are large enough to impact their performance, practice in a similar environment *might* be helpful in learning how to cope with anxiety when testing (I included "might" in quotes because I'm sure there are a lot of kids who might just find that practicing would make them more anxious... our dd feels the practice will be helpful for her to learn how to manage her test stress... even though she's already worried about the test).

Re College Board accommodations - my recommendation is apply for them asap. CB has a system set up to allow schools to apply for students who have IEP/504 accommodations... so the first thing you should do is see if your school will apply for your dd. In our case, our school refused to apply for our ds (even though he had a 504 and a clear record of diagnosis, need and prior use of accommodations). We applied independently and he received each of the accommodations we requested, but we were very thorough in being sure we had read and understood everything the CB was looking for in making the request. If you get into the process and have any questions about how we approached our request, feel free to pm me. FWIW, having gone through the process to apply for CB accommodations and having received them helped make applying for accommodations in college easy.

Best wishes,

polarbear

eta - the reason I suggested applying for CB accommodations asap isn't that it takes a long time for the CB to determine if a student is eligible, but to give yourself time to appeal if the initial decision is a "no".