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A Godwin High School student is among 30 students statewide to earn a National Merit Scholarship.
James Shen earned a National Merit University of Florida Scholarship; he intends to study medicine at the school.
National Merit Scholarships are financed by U.S. colleges and universities. Officials of each sponsor school selected their scholarship winners from among the finalists in the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution.
The awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship. An additional group of recipients will be announced in July, bringing the total number of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship recipients in the 2020 competition to about 4,100.
This year, 167 higher education institutions are underwriting Merit Scholarship awards through the National Merit Scholarship Program. Sponsor colleges and universities include 92 private and 75 public institutions located in 43 states and the District of Columbia.
More than 1.5 million juniors in approximately 21,000 high schools entered the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program when they took the 2018 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.
Last fall, approximately 16,000 semifinalists were named on a state-representational basis in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of the nation’s seniors.
To compete for Merit Scholarship awards, semifinalists first had to advance to the finalist level of the competition by fulfilling additional requirements. Each semifinalist was asked to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards, and leadership positions.
Semifinalists also had to have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, and earn SAT or ACT scores that confirmed the qualifying test performance. From the semifinalist group, some 15,000 met requirements for finalist standing, and about half of the finalists will be Merit Scholarship winners in 2020.
