Scholarships unfair

Three weeks ago, juniors at Blair joined millions of their peers nationwide to take the PSAT. Presumably, everyone had an equal chance to qualify as National Merit Semifinalists.

But this was not so. Juniors in generally high-scoring states, including Maryland, are at a significant disadvantage compared with their counterparts in other states because the National Merit Scholarship Corporation's (NMSC) qualifying PSAT scores differ by state. The NMSC should implement one nationwide standard to guarantee that semifinalists are truly the nation's worthiest 16,000 students.

The NMSC's current system allocates each state's number of semifinalists by the state's percentage of the national population of graduating high school seniors. Thus, lower-achieving states that graduate fewer seniors have lower qualifying PSAT scores than higher-achieving states. This year, Mississippi, Utah, West Virginia and Arkansas had the lowest qualifying score at 202 out of a possible 240 total points, whereas Maryland's qualifying score was 220, the second highest in the nation. (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and U.S. students abroad all shared the highest qualifying score at 221.) In Maryland, 1,123 current seniors who scored under 220 in 2002 would have qualified as semifinalists not by improving their vocabulary but by simply moving to Arkansas.

Selecting semifinalists according to states' populations hurts students in both high-scoring states and low-scoring states. Under the current system, education in low-scoring states has no incentive to improve. Delabian Rice-Thurston, an educational consultant and former executive director of Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools, believes that the current system fails to provoke politicians in lower-achieving states to seek federal funds to improve education in their states, pointing to Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia, whose qualifying scores have been among the lowest for 12 years.

Setting one national qualifying score would not pose a logistical problem to the NMSC. Rice-Thurston recently determined that a national qualifying score of roughly 213 in 2001 would have still garnered the correct number of semifinalists while upping the number of Maryland semifinalists from 290 to approximately 592.

Denying a student who scores 219 in Maryland a chance to win prestige as well as much-needed scholarship money—while rewarding the same opportunity to an Arkansas student who scores 202—is patently unfair. The National Merit Scholarship Program is supposed to be a nationwide competition, not a set of competitions within states. Establishing a nationwide standard for semifinalist qualifying PSAT scores would allow the program to accomplish what should be its true goal: distributing financial and honorary rewards to the highest-scoring students in the nation, regardless of region.

To voice your opinion, write to: NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLARSHIP CORPORATION, Attn: Educational Services, 1560 Sherman Avenue, Suite 200, Evanston, Illinois 60201-4897