Qualifying as a semifinalist for the National Merit Scholarship requires scoring in the top 1% of all 1.3 million PSAT/NMSQT test-takers in the United States. Here at Van Nuys High School, senior Ian Lee was part of that top 1%.
Scoring 1500 out of 1520, Lee successfully qualified as one of these semifinalists, bringing him one step closer to receiving the scholarship.
Lee shared what this scholarship entails.
“Merit-based scholarships are based on how you do mainly academic wise because for national merit scholarships it was based on my PSAT score. So basically it’s how well you do in your academics,” Lee said. “I’m just a semifinalist right now. Finalists’ decisions come in Dec. to Jan. The actual award is given in Feb. There’s only certain people in semifinalists because it’s based on how high your PSAT score is. For California the cut off is an index score of 224, which is around 1500 out of 1520, so it just depends on how high your score is.”
But this wasn’t just something that happened over night. Lee spent countless hours studying and putting in the work to succeed.
“I’m really grateful because I’ve been practicing PSAT for a while now, like around three or four years,” he said. “So I think being able to achieve this goal is something that I’m proud of. I officially started studying in seventh grade and then I took all this to 11th grade.”
Lee had his own unique way of studying that helped him reach this score in the end.
“I went through a lot of practice tests, and for the ones that I got wrong, I would rewrite in a notebook to justify the correct answer in order to know why I got the answer wrong,” he said.
Although the finalist decisions come out in Dec. to Jan., Lee already has all of Van Nuys and his family by his side.
“My parents were ecstatic when they found out, but they also knew that it was only the Semifinalist position,” he said. “That was only the beginning, and both my parents and I knew that we still had a long way to go as finalists results came out in Feb.”
After lots of practice tests, studying and scoring high on the PSAT, Lee scored a 1560 on his first SAT attempt, showing how his hard work had paid off in the end.
