Twenty Bedford High School seniors – about 10 percent of the Class of 2023 – have been recognized for their performances on last spring’s National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
Four seniors – Anna Chong, Emily Kang, Emma Szabo, and Mihir Vaze – achieved scores that ranked them as semifinalists, the highest scoring entrants in each state.
“To be considered for a National Merit Scholarship, semifinalists must advance to finalist standing in the competition by meeting high academic standards and all other requirements,” according to the National Merit Scholarship Corp. The four BHS semifinalists have applied for finalist status.
Another 16 students received letters of commendation “in recognition of their outstanding academic promise.”
The commended students are Adam Capobianco, Selima Chan, Erika Falco, Rachel Gould, Brian Hwang, Paul Jeon, Anirudh Kumar, Sahana Kumar, Connor McClung, Luca Melfi, Manasi Raghunath, Shirley Sun, Emily Zeltser, Eric Zhang, Denis Yakov, and Edward Zhou.
Nationally, semifinalists and commended students comprise the 50,000 highest scorers with 16,000 recognized as semifinalists.