Several Maine South 12th graders have earned recognition from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. Students earned Semifinalist and Commended status by taking the 2025 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants.
The Semifinalists include:
- Chase Braccioforte, Ibrahim Ceker, Alex Davidov, Eleanor Reuhs and Lucas Runtz
The Commended students include:
- Onyx Bakhtoiarova, Gianna Barcinas, Emma Baumann, Carter Bruce, Aiden Chacko, Bartosz Dabkowski, Kassandra Gertos, David Mazurek, Nicholas Mitchell and Sam Ott
Each year, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation uses the PSAT scores of some 1.3 million program entrants to determine recognition. The top 50,000 scores are used for semifinalist and commended status. Of those entrants, less than 1% (only the top 16,000 of the high scorers) qualify as semifinalists with the opportunity to advance to Merit Scholarship awards. The remaining 34,000 qualify for commended status.
Semifinalists can advance to the finalist level of the competition and earn one of three types of scholarships:
- One of 2,500 National Merit $2,500 Scholarships. Winners of this scholarship receive a single payment of $2,500 that is awarded on a state-representational basis.
- A corporate-sponsored scholarship. About 700 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be provided by approximately 120 corporations and business organizations for Finalists who meet their specified criteria, such as children of the grantor’s employees or residents of communities where sponsor plants or offices are located.
- A college-sponsored merit scholarship. About 140 colleges and universities are expected to finance some 3,500 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for Finalists who will attend the sponsor institution.
National Merit Scholarship winners of 2027 will be announced in four nationwide news releases beginning in April and concluding in July. These scholarship recipients will join over 395,000 other distinguished young people who have earned the Merit Scholar title.