Winning a National Merit Scholarship is never an easy ordeal. Approximately 50,000 students (out of 1.4 million juniors) qualify for recognition based on their high PSAT scores each year. Around 34,000 students receive letters of commendation from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.
While these letters don’t contain a scholarship check, they look good to admissions offices and can be listed on your college application. Let’s dive into the details!
National Merit Scholarship Program Review
The National Merit Scholarship Program is a scholarship competition for academic distinction and university scholarships held in the United States.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC), an Evanston, Illinois-based privately funded non-profit corporation, is in charge of running the program. In 1955, the program got underway.
Every year, all students who fulfill the admission conditions are eligible to participate in a competition held by the NMSC. The National Achievement Scholarship Program, which was exclusively for African-American students, was likewise run by the NMSC until 2015.
National Merit Scholars are the top achievers in the National Merit Scholarship Program. The academic and extracurricular achievements of semifinalists and finalists are also acknowledged.
Students who receive a commendation are chosen using a nationally applicable Selection Index score that varies every year and is usually lower than what is needed for participants to be designated semifinalists in their states.
The Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) is used as the qualifying examination for entry into each year’s competitions.
Application Criteria
To be considered for a National Merit Scholarship, semifinalists must meet specific requirements to advance to finalist status.
This entails completing a thorough scholarship application that includes essays and details about leadership roles, honors, and extracurricular accomplishments.
They also need to have a solid academic record, get a school official’s support and recommendation and have SAT results that attest to their passing performance on the qualifying exam.
Based on these standards, a certain percentage of students—which vary annually—move on to become finalists. A small number of finalists are chosen after the competition to receive $2500 in National Merit Scholarships. Less than 1% of the initial pool of student applicants are scholarship winners.
Program Requirements
To enter the scholarship competition, a student must:
- Be enrolled full-time in high school, making typical progress toward graduation, and intending to go college full-time the fall after high school graduation;
- Be a citizen of the United States or a lawful permanent resident of the United States with the intention of becoming a citizen as soon as permitted by law, or have applied for permanent residency with the goal of becoming a citizen as soon as possible and not been denied; and
- Take the preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) at your own school during the designated high school program year, which is often the junior (11th grade) year. When taking the test, students who graduate from high school in three years or less must be in their final or almost final year. If an extenuating circumstance—like a serious illness or natural disaster—precludes a student from taking the exam, they may be able to replace subsequent SAT results by contacting NMSC no later than March 1 of the year after the exam that was missed.