NATIONAL MERIT SEMIFINALISTS Five of Madison Central’s 21 National Merit Semifinalists gathered Tuesday to talk about the school’s PSAT Program. Seniors Wesley Zhang, Avery Jordan, Azmain Alamgir, Benjamin Seiss, Margaret Lawson.
Tyler Cleveland
Madison Central High School led the state once again in producing National Merit semifinalists with a total of 21 of Mississippi’s 135 for the 2013 school year.
Last October, approximately 1.4 million juniors in 22,000 high schools took the Preliminary SAT (or PSAT), which serves as the initial screening for the National Merit Scholarship Program. Nearly 16,000 students score high enough to earn Semifinalist status, which represents less than 1 percent of the high school seniors in the country.
Counting the 21 from Madison Central, eight from St. Andrew’s Episcopal, two from Madison Ridgeland Academy and two home-schoolers, 33 of those 16,000 students hail from Madison County.
This year marks a decade since the last time Madison Central had less than 20 National Merit Semifinalists, according to Beverly Daniel, one of the three teachers in charge of the PSAT preparation program.
“I’m absolutely very proud,” MCHS principal Austin Brown said. “Our kids put a lot of time and effort towards this, and we’ve got a group of teachers here who have put together a program that has been in place for nearly two decades.
“Thanks to their hard work, and the commitment of the students in the program, we’ve been able to produce an impressive amount of National Merit Semifinalists each year.”
Along with Daniel, teachers Debbye Reed and Susan Shivers make up the three-teacher team that leads MC’s PSAT preparation class.
The class meets on a regular basis starting during the sophomore year, for two weeks during the summer, and again in the fall of junior year. Students learn skills as a sophomore, test-taking methods over the summer and work on speed – being able to quickly work through the test – in the fall.
“It’s pretty intense,” said Madison Central senior Avery Jordan, one of the 21 semifinalists. “We have the three different parts of the test – reading comprehension, writing and math – and we have a teacher that specializes in each area. We rotate, so we get equal instruction in each area.”
For many of the students, starting preparation for the PSAT marks their first realization that the work they put in now can truly effect their future.
That was certainly the case for another semifinalist from Madison Central, Margaret Lawson.
“When we start PSAT training, my whole thinking about my educational career changed,” she said. “I realized how important it was, and I wanted to excel.”
Part of that was self-imposed, Lawson added, and part of it came from Daniels, Shivers and Reed.
“They are strong characters – definitely the kind of teachers you will never forget,” she said. “Mrs. Daniels tells really funny jokes, and Mrs. Shivers is famous for her frequent use of vocabulary terms. Everyone calls Mrs. Reid ‘Mama Reid’ because she’s so easy-going, unless we scored poorly on the writing part of the pre-test.”
Benjamin Seiss, yet another National Merit Semifinalist from Madison Central, said he moved into the program when his family moved from Arlington, Tenn. in the summer between his sophomore and junior years, so he missed much of the skills training.
Still, with the help of the program, he worked hard enough to earn his distinction.
“I was not prepared for the writing portion of the test,” Seiss said. “My vocabulary and grammar was very poor and just not where it needed to be, but constantly practicing allowed me to qualify.”
As Daniel explained, as hard as it is to acquire and remember the knowledge necessary to do well on the test, its equally hard to learn the test-taking skills required to work through the exam quickly enough to answer all the questions.
Senior Wesley Zhang, who qualified for Semifinalist status last year, said he didn’t finish the PSAT pre-test when he took it several times as a freshman.
“We worked on my time by constantly drilling,” he said. “We took practice test after practice test with an allotted time, and I got faster and faster and my scores got higher and higher.”
Azmain Alamgir, Zhang’s friend and classmate who also earned semifinalist status, said all the constant drilling caused him to go into auto-pilot when it came time to actually take the test.
“We were so prepared that it was just like any other day,” he said. “I knew what would be on the test and felt comfortable answering each question. We had a decent amount of preparation, and nothing really stood out to me against the mock tests we had taken.”
When it came to test-day advice, Zhang said a lot of it can be overblown.
“People say you should eat a big, full breakfast,” he said. “But we learned that you should just do whatever is normal for you. If you don’t usually eat a big, full breakfast, and you do the morning of the test, you might feel sick.”
