CENTRAL — Daniel High School seniors Omri Bein, Charlie Dove, Joseph Jensen, Andres McNeill and Kevis Tsao have been recognized as semifinalists in the 2016 National Merit Scholarship Program.
The 2015-2016 school year is the 61st year of the prestigious program, which honors academically talented high school seniors and allows them to compete for 7,400 National Merit Scholarship awards worth more than $32 million.
Approximately 1.5 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the scholarship program by taking the 2014 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The nationwide pool of semifinalists represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors and includes the highest scoring entrants in each state.
To become a finalist, the semifinalists and their high school must submit a detailed scholarship application in which they provide information about their academic record, participation in school and community activities, demonstrated leadership abilities, and honors and awards received.
A semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test.
From the approximately 16,000 semifinalists, about 15,000 are expected to advance to the finalist level and will be notified in February of this designation. All National Merit Scholarship winners will be selected from this group of finalists.
Three types of Merit Scholarship awards are offered to Finalists: National Merit $2500 Scholarships, corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards and college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards. National Merit Scholarship winners will be announced next April through July.
