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The Preliminary SAT®/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test is a co-sponsored program by the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC).
PSAT/NMSQT stands for Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. It's a standardized test that provides firsthand practice for the SAT Reasoning Test. It also gives you a chance to enter National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) scholarship programs.
The PSAT/NMSQT measures:
Critical reading skills
- Vocabulary in Context: These questions ask you to determine the meanings of words from their context in the reading passage.
- Literal Comprehension: These questions assess your understanding of significant information directly stated in the passage.
- Extended Reasoning: These questions measure your ability to synthesize and analyze information as well as to evaluate the assumptions made and the techniques used by the author. Most of the reading questions fall into this category. You may be asked to identify cause and effect, make inferences, recognize a main idea or an author's tone, and follow the logic of an analogy or an argument.
Math problem-solving skills
The SAT includes expanded math topics, such as exponential growth, absolute value, and functional notation, and place greater emphasis on such other topics as linear functions, manipulations with exponents, and properties of tangent lines.
Important skills formerly measured in the quantitative comparison format, such as estimation and number sense, will continue to be measured through the multiple choice and student response (grid-in) questions.
Writing skills
Short Essay
- The short essay measures your ability to:
- Organize and express ideas clearly
- Develop and support the main idea
- Use appropriate word choice and sentence structure
- You'll be asked to develop a point of a view on an issue, using reasoning and evidence - based on your own experiences, readings, or observations - to support your ideas.
- The essay will be scored by trained high school and college teachers. Each reader will give the essay a score from 1 to 6 (6 is the highest score) based on the overall quality of the essay and your demonstration of writing competence.
- Get more information about the essay:
- The multiple-choice writing questions measure your ability to:
- Improve sentences and paragraphs
- Identify errors (such as diction, grammar, sentence construction, subject-verb agreement, proper word usage, and wordiness)
- Try multiple-choice questions:
- Identifying Sentence Errors --
This question type measures your ability to:
- recognize faults in usage
- recognize effective sentences that follow the conventions of standard written English
- Improving Sentences --
This question type on the SAT measures your ability to:
- recognize and correct faults in usage and sentence structure
- recognize effective sentences that follow the conventions of standard written English
- Improving Paragraphs --
This type of question measures your ability to:
- edit and revise sentences in the context of a paragraph or entire essay
- organize and develop paragraphs in a coherent and logical manner
- apply the conventions of standard written English
You have developed these skills over many years, both in and out of school. This test doesn't require you to recall specific facts from your classes.
The most common reasons for taking the PSAT/NMSQT is to receive feedback on your strengths and weaknesses on skills necessary for college study. You can then focus your preparation on those areas that could most benefit from additional study or practice.
You can enter the competition for scholarships from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (grade 11).
It’s also to help prepare for the SAT. You can become familiar with the kinds of questions and the exact directions you will see on the SAT.
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