Six seniors from McIntosh and Starr’s Mill High Schools are among 16,000 semifinalists nationwide competing in the 53rd annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

The students are McIntosh High’s Jeanie Choi, Craig D. Handy, Michael S. Qin and Hanjun Zhu; and Starr’s Mill’s Matthew T. Quillian and Tradd S. Ritchey.

These scholastically talented high school seniors have the opportunity to continue in the competition for some 8,200 Merit Scholarship awards worth $33 million that will be offered next spring. To be considered for a Merit Scholarship award, semifinalists must fulfill several requirements and advance to the finalist level of the competition. About 90 percent of the semifinalists are expected to become finalists, and approximately half of the finalists will be selected as Merit Scholarship winners.

More than 1.4 million juniors in nearly 21,000 U.S. high schools entered the 2008 National Merit Program by taking the 2006 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, which represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.

To become a finalist, a semifinalist must have an academic record of very high performance, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier qualifying test performance. The semifinalist and a school official must submit a detailed scholarship application, which includes the student’s self-descriptive essay and information about the semifinalist’s participation and leadership in school and community activities.

Merit scholarship winners of 2008 will be announced April-July

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