HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson High School senior William Jackson has been named a semifinalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition.
Jackson, son of Dr. Kory and Amanda Jackson, brings the number of district students to receive the honor to 58 since 1981. Both of his parents are HHS alumni.
In addition to being named a National Merit semifinalist, Jackson also scored a perfect 36 on his ACT test. Only 1,598 of 1.92 million – 0.195 percent – students for the class of 2021 who took the test earned the perfect score.
The National Merit Scholarship Program honors individual students who show exceptional academic ability. To qualify, students had to take the 2019 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. More than 1.5 million juniors took the test last fall from about 21,000 high schools nationwide.
Out of the 1.5 million students who took the test, approximately 16,000 semifinalists were named.
To become a finalist, a semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier qualifying test performance.