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GHS senior Ishikawa named National Merit Semifinalist
Greencastle High School announced on Friday that Ty Ishikawa has been recognized as a National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist.
The senior is now working on his application to hopefully be one of the finalists in the program.
Initiated in 1955, the National Merit Scholarship Program is conducted by National Merit Scholarship Corp., a not-for-profit organization that operates without government assistance. A sizable number of National Merit Scholarships to be offered in 2025 will be underwritten by NMSC with its own funds, but most will be supported by some 280 independent corporate organizations, higher education institutions, and individual donors.
In each annual National Merit Scholarship Program, about 50,000 academically talented high school students are honored, but only some 16,000 of them are named semifinalists. Students who qualify as semifinalists based on their performance on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test are the only program participants who have an opportunity to advance to the finalist level and compete for National Merit Scholarships.
About 6,870 of the outstanding finalists will be chosen as Merit Scholarship® winners in the 2025 competition.
The 2023 PSAT/NMSQT served as an initial screen of over 1.3 million entrants to the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program. The selection index scores of students who met program participation requirements were used to designate a pool of more than 16,000 semifinalists on a state allocation basis. Semifinalists are the highest scorers in each of the 50 states and represent less than one percent of each state’s high school seniors.
Although semifinalist qualifying scores vary from one state to another, the scores of all semifinalists are extremely high.