Regarding PSAT scores and scholarships...

I think 216 ought to be good enough to get you a National Merit Scholarship.   NMS's get full tuition to a number of places, like Oklahoma, Baylor, Tulane....    Although, when I took it, there was no Writing section, so my scores and yours might not be the same (mine they took Verbal, doubled it, and added it to Math).

Hm, did they completely change the scoring system on the SAT recently? There used to be only English and Math, both scored 100-800.

PSAT not SAT... also known as NMSQT. So I'm not sure about the SAT... Also, while searching online, the PSAT seems to have been changed from Verbal to the two sections, as tetley noted above.

Edit: after a quick search, it seems the SAT was also changed to 3 sections, the same name and such as the PSAT sections... And looking over the PSAt packet, the equivalent SAT score can be found by multiplying PSAT scores by 10.

Ah, I'd read that as practice SAT. If it's just 1/10 though then, unless they've changed the difficulty of the test really radically in the past few years, those scores are pretty good. Though whether you can get anything purely based on them is another question; there wasn't much as that goes, back when I did the SAT--did it only to find that Notre Dame was the nearby only school that even cared about it.

Depends on what you mean by "recently." From the Wikipedia just now: "Old scores may be recentered to compare to 1995 to present scores by using official College Board tables[26] , which in the middle ranges add about 70 points to Verbal and 20 or 30 points to Math. In other words, current students have a 100 (70 plus 30) point advantage over their parents."

I still think a 216 PSAT is probably good enough for a National Merit.   If memory serves me right, I got a 203 when I took it, and I got full tuition to places all over the country.   Subtract 10 from 216, that's still higher than what I got.   I would be very surprised if NMS is no longer based almost entirely on PSAT anymore.   I believe around 90% of the people who initially qualify for National Merit eventually go on to be a finalist.  At that point, it's only a question of what kind of scholarship you get--not whether or not you're a Natinoal Merit Scholar.

Beg pardon, I wasn't talking about the National Merit stuff, just the 'grade inflation' thing, which is extra confusing on account of having 3 scores now instead of the 2 that most of us 'geezers' had. From what I know of that program, there is no fixed number--each year's candidates are compared amongst themselves and you win by being in the top percentiles. The National Merit site seems to carefully avoid talking about scores as they relate to scholarships.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSAT the sum of the three PSAT components is used as the selection index for the National Merit Scholarship. To be a semifinalist you need to be in the 99th percentile which varies from year to year and also from state to state. For the 2007 competition which was based on the 2005 PSAT, the minimum semifinalist score ranged from 204 in Mississippi to 224 in Massachusetts so it will probably depend on where you live.

I only applied to three schools and was accepted by them all pretty much exclusively on the basis of my SAT score; Cal Tech, Rensselaer and MIT, which ultimately became more of a choice of Boston over LA (Troy was really never a consideration). As far as the SAT I did get a "perfect" 1600 but luckily there was no writing portion to drag down my score in 1971.

It was eight years ago. It's my understanding that most schools (at least in this area) go by the ACT instead now. In any case I ended up getting where I got based on grades and class rank more than test scores.

If only money grew on trees, I might have bothered applying to MIT myself. My dad got accepted back in the late 70s based on his SAT score (which I beat, even accounting for the recentering) but he couldn't afford to go either.

Wow. Two different spellings for the same word, in the same sentence.

Your 'Critical Reading' score just went down a point, as did your 'Writing' score.

I am looking into going to college for game programing and development, and by the looks of it RIT (Rochester) appears to be a good choice... A few months ago, I was sent a letter about my ACT scores in which it said I qualified for around $15,000 a year; a figure which it said could increase based on my PSAT score.

By the way Moosetek, I don't care about those two scores.... Its the one question I missed in math that bothers me If not for that missed math question I would have got a perfect score on math in both the ACT and PSAT...

When I went to MIT in 1971 tuition was $2,200 a year. Today that figure stands at $34,750 a year and another $10,400 for undergraduate room and board. One interesting note was this report in the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09mit.html that MIT will not charge tuition for families making less than $75,000 per year.

Yes, a 216 is good enough to receive a National Merit, as that is about what I got on the PSAT (though I only ended up being a semi-finalist for the actual award - still looks good on your transcript).  Also, if you add a 0 to the end of your PSAT score, that is supposed to be about where you'll score on the SAT, though I don't know how accurate that really is (I received a 1960 on the SAT, should have been around a 2100 if that was true).

The SAT today consists of three sections: Math, Writing, and Critical Reading, each worth up to 800 points, unless they changed it since last year.  The Writing section is fairly new, and so colleges have not been considering your score in that area when applying for scholarships.  It consists of a multiple choice section and one essay.  However, I believe that starting this coming spring semester that they are taking it into account, so lucky you gets to worry about it.

It's my personal opinion that the essay part of the Writing section is a little out of whack.  I think that they're looking for people who follow the silly "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then thell them what you told them" format, which I adamantly did not adhere to, because it's stupid.  My college writing professor has said the same thing.  He's also said that I'm a gifted writer, which is hilarious because I only got half credit for the essay both times I took the SAT, and failed another essay for a CLEP.

Apologies, rant over.

However, on the subject of scholarships, absolutely do not forget about your high school GPA.  When being considered for non-need-based scholarships, SAT scores and your GPA are always found together (except maybe for the National Merit, I don't remember).  Also, if you were homeschooled like me, expect to be excluded from a very large percentage of state-funded scholarships.  I was denied a full ride scholarship I qualified for simply because I did not have an obviously arbitrary 'class rank', and was not even offered financial aid of any kind from Purdue for the same reason.  But yes, if you have a good cumulative GPA (at least 3.5, preferably higher) and a good SAT score (about 1300 Math + Reading for the higher scholarships last year, but if they start including Writing I don't know), you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a good scholarship.

Oh, and Moosetek... misspelling a word doesn't affect your Critical Reading score, because they're all multiple choice - at least on the SAT.  The only thing that might hurt is your essay score in the Writing section.

I got almost nothing else but National Merit scholar (didn't need it anyway...), and I think it's partially because I didn't have a class rank, either.  Of course, the reason is that I skipped a little over a year of HS (a decision I do *NOT* regret), but that didn't seem to matter much when considered according to "objective" criteria.  When it got subjective, sure, this guy's unranked because he's already in college.....  

I highly recommend leaving HS early, if yours is the typical high school.  They say your senior year is all special...c'mon...half the year you spend wishing you would just graduate already.  So you're going to miss Senior Prom?  Big deal...I went to so many fraternity formals my freshman year, prom was a joke.   You can get many more dates with your same senior classmates if you're already in college.   Oh yeah, and take the AP's your junior year.        My HS newspaper did a story on me, and two or three underclassmen later decided to also skip.  I don't know where they are now, but at least they were spared another year in that mental institution.

I am planning on staying in high school as long as I can. Mostly, this is because our state (ohio) has a PSEOP program, which lets those who score sufficiently high take college courses as a substitute for high school classes. I have been taking classes (paid completely by the state, even books) at the local community college since my freshman year. I took 6 semester hours my first year, 9 my second, 9 first semester of this year, and signed up for 15 credit hours next semester. Next year I will not be taking any courses at the high school (I am only taking 2 this year) and will be taking entirely courses at the community college. This should reduce the coursework I do in my first year or two by a large amount and save thousands.

By the way, the maximum classes the state will fully pay for is equal to 2.5 semester hours per high school class semester I am not taking, so next year I will be able to take 40 semester hours at the community college if I so choose, all paid for by the state. This is why I am not choosing to graduate early... why stop milking the golden cow when its still got a few thousand left in it?

Also, after a quick search online the cuttoff score for Ohio NMSC is 211, so mine was high enough to get me into that.

Must be nice to be able to do college classes for high school credit. I took a few classes in high school, then had to pay to sleep through the same damn classes in college because my high school didn't offer AP anything, and my college didn't let you test out of anything worthwhile. So I got to pay to take chemistry classes I slept through and still broke the curve. First test my freshman year the average grade was below 70, the highest was a 78; with the glaring exception of myself and a girl from my class, we got 95 and 98. There was about 150 people in that lecture that were quite simply PISSED at us

Class rank is one of those things that looks great, but is really meaningless. All 5 children in my family graduated in the top ten of their class, but the needed GPA to get there varied greatly. My older brother graduated 6th two years before I did, and had a GPA a full point lower than mine. I tied for second.

When you go to a school as small as mine was (64 people), some unfortunate things happen. A guy nearly didn't get into West Point simply because he wasn't in the top 5% of his class, despite having a nearly perfect GPA. The system wasn't made for schools that small. I missed a couple scholarships because I wasn't in the top 1% from getting one B my freshman year (fuck you, keyboarding. That's right, fuck you and your damn electric typewriters that broke down during the final. Yeah, that's how I ruined my perfect GPA.)

Kryo if MIT would look at your SAT scores and accept you right away... wouldn't you be able to get scholarships somewhere!?!?!?!

And yeah my PSAT scores weren't that good (pretty much average, 75 percentile or something >.>). Then again I didn't study or really care since it isn't the real SATs.

Yeah, which is why I was upset when I found out that I wouldn't be getting that full ride scholarship because of it.

Not really - GPA has a lot more to do with scholarships (IMO) than the SAT's. I know for me, I could get in to MIT easy, but I couldn't get scholarships because my GPA was only moderate and my class placement was in the bottom quarter of my graduating class.

So I went to the Military and my Uncle Sam ended up paying for my edumakashen - {G}.

I have pretty mixed feelings about this new section also. When I was dawdling in community college, I barely passed the essay part of some standardized test even though I had rather high SAT Verbals and was getting top grades on all my writing for classes. But pedagogically speaking, I have to stand up for the boring old intro-support-support-support-conclusion format. Until that format is both boring and easy for a student, it should be beaten into them with sticks. Like Picasso said about painting--you gotta learn the rules so you can break them well.

That 5-paragraph stuff is even more boring to grade than it is to write, but it is quick and painless grading compared to reading the work of students who really don't understand paragraph structure, much less a standard essay. I hope your college writing proessor distinguished between students like you and folks who'd escaped high school without much idea of the difference between commas and periods.

Then again, literacy is really going out of fashion, so maybe never mind...

High end ones like MIT certainly are, but public universities aren't so bad if you can support yourself and be fairly responsible with your finances (the latter being the big issue for most people these days). I certainly wouldn't complain if it were cheaper, but I could pay my university tuition out of pocket if I really had to and I'm not rich by any means. I just prefer to earn some interest on that money now and pay off the subsidized loans as soon as they come up, netting a few hundred bucks extra to show for the trouble.

You want to know what's bad, try the computerized version of the GRE sometime.   Talk about apples and oranges.   The written and the computerized version are nothing like each other, the scores bear absolutely no resemblance to each other except at the very middle of the bell curve, yet they're presented to grad schools as the same test.   It's like all they did was take two completely different tests and normalize the scores to be "equal".

216 on the PSAT will get you into the National Merit Scholoship program.

There are a LOT of scholarships avaliable nowadays, just keep your eyes open. If you get into the semi finals/finals of the NationalMeritScholarship program, you'll get $10,000 a year.

Haha, you're in Ohio too! I took a few PSEOP programs, but my school wasn't really enthused about that; so I haven't taken any this year. I hate my school, they don't let me do anything on my own, I have to take all the low level classes they offer, and won't recognize 3 of my college credits in Robotics and C++

95% of the students accepted into MIT get scholarships, so it should be okay. I plan to go to MIT, and I'm banking on a full/partial scholorship, because we just bought a house and the economy and yeah.

I don't know if it's been rescaled since my time in high school more than a decade ago, but back then a 216 was certainly good enough (as others have said) for National Merit standing and a full ride to many state schools. Personally I had a 222 (easy to remember, or I'm sure I wouldn't) and had a full ride plus a semester stipend for books/food/whatever else. There's nothing better than having college pay for you rather than the other way around.

Thank god i live in a country where education is free and my parents didn't have to worry about if they could afford sending me to a university.