By Clara Moffitt
The most elite high school recognition. The most incredible accomplishment. The opportunity to top all opportunities. This is the National Merit recognition.
National Merit recognition is an award given to students who score in the top 0.5 percentile on their 11th grade PSAT, earning the title of National Merit Semifinalist. In this year’s graduating class, three of our students earned this prestigious acknowledgement. Our Semifinalists are Bryce Klassen, Zane Pautzke, and Peter Surin. The Semifinalists represent 6 percent of the senior class, which is phenomenal given the prestige of the accomplishment and the hard work required to achieve it. In fact, many other local schools such as Marcos de Niza or Dobson High School, or even our rivals, Veritas and Chandler Prep, all with many more students than Tempe Prep, but did not have any semifinalists at all.
Why is this recognition important? Because Semifinalists get a lot of scholarship money. According to our College Counselor, Mrs. Moffitt, “Colleges want students with these recognitions because it improves their rankings, so many colleges offer them full-tuition and/or full-ride scholarships that include tuition, room and board.” With college costing $10,000 to $75,000 a year, it is certainly worth students’ time to pursue these opportunities.
Four additional TPA seniors are recognized as National Merit Commended Scholars, meaning they scored in the top 2.5 percentile in the nation. TPA’s Commended Scholars are Jacqueline Kirk, Alec Mitchell, Steven Veenstra, and Alexander Wait. This means that 18 percent of our seniors scored in the top 2.5 percent nationally.
As you can imagine, such accomplishments must be hard to obtain. However, our National Merit Semifinalists have shared their study tips and advice. They all took a number of practice tests and dedicated much of their time to studies.
Zane Pautzke studied through practice tests. After having taken a few prep classes, Zane sought out practice tests on the SAT website, Khan academy, and various other medias. He says, “Take a bunch of tests. Take the test, find what you did wrong, look at the error, correct it, [and] understand why it’s wrong.”
Peter Surin also took advantage of practice tests, along with reading through test strategies and familiarizing himself with the test as a whole.
The Semifinalists agree that in order to have good test scores you have to put in the work. Peter offers his advice: “Answer [questions] correctly and quickly and learn how to do this through practice and studying strategies.”
Zane wants TPA students to know that you can always improve your score if you really want to and try hard. He says that a low score in sophomore year “doesn’t mean that you can’t become National Merit. It all depends on the amount of practice . . . stay motivated and study.”
Good luck to all TPA students in grades 9-11 taking the PSAT on Oct. 24. We have remarkable seniors who have set a course for us to follow.