... but fwiw if memory serves me - back when I was in high school, re the National Merit Scholarships - when you took the SAT (or PSAT?) you qualified as a semi-finalist - and then in order to become a finalist a company that sponsored a scholarship had to "find" you - you had to be interested in their line of work and it also helped to have a relative who worked for the company or have some other means of standing out other than just the test scores. There was more to NMSFs than simply scoring above a certain point on the test - actual scholarship $ had to exist somewhere for each scholarship, and that usually came with some restrictions in addition to test scores. I remember that at our high school, the kids who got NMFS weren't the kids who were necessarily at the very top of the class in terms of achievement... and there were kids (including me) who scored very very highly on the tests but were only "semi-finalists".
Wow, that I did not know either. No one contacted me following my NMSF score and I just assumed that the kids who were NMF had scored higher than those of us with NMSF next to our names.
