A school record of 51 seniors were selected as National Merit Semifinalists based on their PSAT results last fall. The previous record was 40 Semifinalists in the Class of 2018; the class of 2019 had 25.

Some people might attribute the large number to the large size of the class (roughly 380), but assistant principal Brian Safine said that assumption doesn’t tell the whole story.

“In terms of raw numbers, it’s our largest class that we’ve had in at least a decade, but that still wouldn’t explain the disproportionate number,” Safine said. ”It certainly is an incredibly motivated group of students in a, generally, very motivated class.” 

These 51 seniors earned a score of 222 or above out of a possible 228 on the test.

Semifinalists in the competition who apply to be finalists have the opportunity to become National Merit Scholars in March 2020, where they will receive scholarship benefits and materials from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. 

 It’s more typical for high schools around the country to have one, two or three Semifinalists out of their entire senior classes, but some Bay Area schools such as Mission San Jose, Lynbrook and Harker often have 40 or more.

Class of 2020 National Merit Semifinalists: Eman Ahmad, Bhrugu Bharathi, Surbhi Bhat, George Bian, Leo Cao, Adrienne Chan, Kiran Chandrasekher, Allen Chen, Jason Hong, Bradley Hsu, Rishi Jain, Anthony Jiang, Riya Kalra, Sabrina Kim, Ujjwal Krishnamurthi, Ritika Kuppam, Christine Lee, Victor Lee, Connie Liang, Nevin Liang, Katherine Lu, Mathew Luo, Jeffrey Ma, Stephanie Ma, Armina Mayya, Arya Mididaddi, Sanmati Nakil, Anna Novoselov, Ronak Pai, Anishi Patel, Elise Phan, Rohan Rao, Sanjana Ravi, Aditya Reddy, Daniel Robinson, Adhit Sankaran, Ethan Sarnevesht, Dhruv Shah, Nikhil Sridar, Sandhya Sundaram, Howard Tang, Michael Tang, Nandini Thakur, Alex Wang, Brandon Wang, Elaine Wang, Albert Xiao, Christina Xiao, Jeffrey Xu, Joshua Yoon, Brian Zhu