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It does change the point that you wrote.

No, it most certainly does not.

Besides, this is an easy enough debate to settle. We can look at the number of SEMI-FINALISTS for the Nat'l Merit Scholarship. They are made same by virtue of their test scores.

That would be a somewhat better indicator, but even that will still bias towards schools which push their students to take the PSAT in order to qualify for the NMS. Trying to qualify for the NMS is listed as one of the most common reasons for taking the PSAT/NMSQT , and indeed the test is even named and sponsoeed by the NMS (thus the "NMSQT" in its full name: "National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test". Any school which aggressively presses to pump up its NMS numbers by ensuring that qualifying students complete their applications will also obviously press students to *take* the PSAT/NMSQT in the first place. Thus high NMS numbers will correlate with high numbers of SEMIfinalists as well, due to level of school involvement and not necessarily higher score numbers.

I'd be far more interested in seeing the test RESULTS, and not just the raw number of students who have achieved over X on the test, since this says *nothing* about the number of students who actually *took* the test. For all you know, that Catholic school ensured that most of its students *took* the test, while the public schools didn't bother and had low turnout. This alone would ensure more semifinalists and finalists for the Catholic school, EVEN IF THE STUDENT'S ACTUAL TEST RESULTS WERE IDENTICAL across the schools. This is is why I point out that the raw number of NMS finalists is a poor indicator of actual school quality.

I'm betting that the public skools around here would sell their own sister to Satan to get one additional NMS semifinalist.

I'm betting you have it exactly backwards. Public schools don't need to "advertise" for students, nor is their funding based on how many NMS semifinalists or finalists they can manage to produce. PRIVATE schools, on the other hand, have a very strong incentive to gain academic "bragging rights" of various sorts which they can use to try to justify why parents should part with their hard-earned dollars and send their kids to that private school as opposed to public school or some other private school.

If I ran a private school, you can bet your a** I'd be pushing for every single student to take the PSAT/NMSQT in order to pump the school's numbers up as high as possible, and to beat on every student who made semifinalist to make sure they damned well sent in their applications. Public schools, on the other hand, frankly don't have to care whether a particular student takes the qualifying test or not.

Do I have to go look this up, or do you just want to believe someone who's lived in this area a long, long time?

Yes, you really do have to look it up. And don't just find the number of semi-finalists, since that tells little for reasons I've described above. Find the RATE at which students qualify (i.e., number of semifinalists divided by the total number who *took* the test), or even better, find the distribution of actual test scores among all students who took the test at each set of schools.

If you're going to try to "argue with statistics", then you're going to have to do the hard work of making sure that you acquire the most directly relevant statistics, and just not ones that can or have been skewed by parties who are less than disinterested -- like private schools that have a strong incentive to "produce results" which they can use to "sell" their school to parents in exchange for tuition fees. NMS numbers can be too easily skewed simply by the level of school participation, entirely apart from any difference in actual test scores.