The Answer Sheet: National Merit

What you should know about the PSAT if you have a high school student.

I have long wondered why the National Merit scholarship program had so much cache, given the criteria necessary for winning. The program is a competition in which kids become eligible if they do well on the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT test that they generally take in 11th grade. Any regular reader to this blog will know that I do not look kindly on anything in education that relies on a single standardized test score. Here is a critique of the program that I recently read and wanted to share. It was written by Jonathan Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School. This is how he starts: "National Merit status is a good example of the Platonic distinction between attractive illusion and truth."