This year, Cleveland High School has produced two National Merits Scholars Finalists.
The National Merit Scholarship is a selection similar to the college applications process. The first round of selection is based on your SAT scores. Only the top 1% of SAT scores in U.S. high schools will become semi finalists, at which point they will submit an application with their extracurricular profile, high school transcript, and counselor letter of recommendations. Those who are chosen from the selected pool of around 16,000 semi-finalists only number around 2500, less than 15 percent.
Senior Eli Stabler, one of the two recipients of the National Merits Scholarship scored a 1580 on the SAT. He gave his recommendation on how to prepare for the dreaded examination.
“I would say one of the resources a lot of people know about is Khan Academy. That’s kind of a recent development. That’s all I used to study, just putting in the hours on Academy SATs study, and then also using practice tests available through College Board,” Stabler said.
Owen Rowe, the other recipient, concurred with Stabler’s belief. “Honestly, I think a lot of the preparation that I did was outside of school. I really just studied pretty hard. I did Khan Academy. I bought an SAT questions book, and I just set aside an hour, two hours on Sunday, every week and just did problems,” Rowe said.
Rowe remarked, “I think one of the things that really helped me was when I first started taking the SAT – I took it a couple of times – the math section was dragging me down. I think that SAT math is a very specific type of math that you can’t just prepare for with school work.”
Rowe advised future SAT examinees to go with “whatever works for you. I bought a book because it helped me just to have a book that I know I can write my answers in, which would be like the test. It also stays in my brain more than something online. But of course with the transition of the SAT online, it could be very different in the future,” he said.
Juniors at Cleveland who signed up for the SAT will take it Wednesday, March 20 at school. The test is completely digital and is reported to be significantly shorter than years past.