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The National Merit Qualifying Exam is the PSAT. It is supposed to be taken junior year - the year BEFORE a student finishes high school. The National Merit scholarships are not large- just a couple grand, I think, but they are prestigious.
Many colleges give full tuition scholarships for NMF these days and offer special programs for them.
Edit:
Read the other posts.
I was a NMF and got a free ride just for this at college.
My scores on the PSAT were a bolt out of the blue for the HS I was at. They were not really high, but as high than the "top" students in the district. They made me take the SAT test a a few weeks later just to correlate the PSAT. Which it did.
My second SAT score a year later was MUCH (+120 ) higher than it was the year before. I took the ACT a few months after the second SAT and did as well as you could.
I thought the ACT was much easier than the SAT as the answers were more clear cut.
On prep:
The SAT verbal had several questions where a good case could be made for two or even three responses. I flipped through some prep books and noted this and this helped to figure out what the test authors wanted. IMHO the SAT authors try to be clever and a really smart kid will see things they don't.
For this reason, alone, a few prep books are good as the student can analyze their "mistakes" and calibrate their response.
