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Fifteen Uni seniors named National Merit Semifinalists

By Gargoyle Staff
Published: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 - 10:38pm
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By Andrew Lovdahl
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006, The OG, news

Fifteen Uni seniors, or approximately one quarter of the Class of 2007, have been selected as National Merit Semifinalists, one of the top academic honors high school seniors can receive.

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation released the names of some 16,000 semifinalists today. Uni's semifinalists are:

Emma Anselin
Devika Bagchi
Michael Belmont
Robert Boyce
Amelia Breault
Alex Cahill
Christine Cheng
Kathleen Easley
Martin Geiger
Daisy Hassani
Benjamin Hyman
Annie Liang
Chandra Pathuri
Marquis Wang
Victoria Wang

About 15,000 of the semifinalists will advance to finalist status in February. Finalists will be eligible for some 8,200 Merit Scholarship awards, worth a total of $33 million.

Last year, 25 members of Uni's senior class were named semifinalists, and all of them became finalists.

Students become eligible for the National Merit Program by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. About 1.4 million students take the PSAT/NMSQT annually.

This year the selection index for the state of Illinois went up slightly. This index is a score that varies throughout the country and determines the number of semifinalists in each state. The increase in the Illinois index may account for at least some of the dropoff in Uni semifinalists. Look for additional coverage of this in future issues of the print Gargoyle.

Comments

September 27, 2006 - 2:58pm — Parent Yoder (not verified)

Congratualtions to those who were named semifinalists and to those who did not but did their best. BTW the number of semifinalists at IMSA went from 49 to 35, according to their press releases. Perhaps you could look at New Trier and other prominent IL schools to evaluate the effect of the revision in the Illinois index.
September 27, 2006 - 4:29pm — dporreca (not verified)

Thanks for the message. We always compare Uni's NMS totals with those at other Illinois schools. Usually Uni is No. 1 in percentage of seniors who are semifinalists, and third or fourth in absolute numbers. Those comparative figures weren't available when Andrew Lovdahl wrote the brief story that we posted online. He's working on a more in-depth story for our October print issue, which will include the kind of numbers you referred to. Thanks again. David Porreca, Gargoyle adviser

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