The Semifinalist cutoffs for the class of 2021 (October 2019 PSAT) were leaked on College Confidential on Aug. 28, around 15 days earlier than previous years. With a decrease in cutoffs (from 222 to 221), 30 seniors have been announced as National Merit semifinalists. 

National Merit is a corporation that identifies top scholars based on their PSAT scores from junior year. To be a semifinalist, a student’s score must be in the top 1 percent in their state. This amounts to around 1,942 students chosen from the 326,446 who took the test in California, according to College Board Statistics. 

The Class of 2021 National Merit Semifinalists are Mithil Chakraborty, Ankita Chatterjee, Stefano Corno, Alexandra Dicheva, Anna Dymchenko, Francesca Fernandes, Ritika Garg, Allison Hartley, Dora Hu, Tiffany Huang, Tia Jain, Irith Katiyar, Rohan Kumar, Karen Lei, Andrew Li, Colin Li, Enoch Luk, Nitya Marimuthu, Nikhil Nair, Aarav Naveen, Dylan Overby, Anthony Qin, Arvind Ramachandran, Niyanth Rao, Kaitlyn Tsai, Sarah Wang, Henry Weng, Oliver Ye, Christine Zhang and Amanda Zhu.