From left are Maden Herve, Alexander Koutsoukos, Vignesh Subramanian, Principal Robert O'Donnell, Ashleigh Coltman, Rishabh Raniwala and Jeffrey Huang at Wilton High School.
Contributed photo / Wilton High SchoolWILTON — Six Wilton High School seniors have been named finalists in the National Merit Scholarship program.
They are Ashleigh M. Coltman, Maden J. Herve, Jeffrey J. Huang, Alexander Koutsoukos, Rishabh Raniwala and Vignesh Subramanian.
More than 15,000 finalists have been identified across the country from the 16,000 students who were named as semifinalists in September. The finalists are eligible for some 7,600 National Merit Scholarships worth more than $31 million that will be offered next spring.
To become a finalist, a semifinalist must submit a detailed scholarship application, which includes evidence of an academic record of very high performance, endorsement by the school principal, SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier qualifying test performance, a self-descriptive essay and evidence of the student’s participation and leadership in school and community activities.
The competition began with more than 1.5 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools taking the 2018 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants.
Those who became semifinalists represented less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, and included the highest-scoring entrants in each state.