A total of 52 grade 12 students have received commendations from this year’s National Merit program, putting them among about 34,000 students out of 1.5 million nationwide. They are: Ambrish Amaranthan, Trisha Basu, Appu Bhaskar, Rishi Bhatia, Tracey Chan, Jacob Chappell, Meghna Chatterjee, Christine Chien, Daniel Cho, Timothy Chou, Jennifer Dai, Mallika Dhaliwal, Anthony Fandrianto, Katharine Forsberg, Peter Gao, Pierre Gerard, Vrinda Goel, Miranda Gorman, Ashley Hejtmanek, Anshul Jain, Lorraine Kim, Warren Kwong, Christina Li, Andrew Liang, Katie Liang, Kristi Lui, Rohan Mahajan, Partha Mahajani, Henna Mishra, Daisy Mohrman, Shireen Moshkelani, Arko Mukherjee, Moneesha Mukherjee, Nirjhar Mundkur, Chris Ng, Margaux Nielsen, Shannon O’Reilly, Ruchika Podury, Michael Prutton, Tanya Rai, James Seifert, Ganesh Sivakumar, Naomi So, Catherine Stiles, Supraja Swamy, Diane Villadsen, Michelle Vu, Allika Walvekar, Aileen Wen, Timothy Weng, Anne West and Kenneth Wong.

Students entered this year’s contest by taking the 2009 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Commendations are given to students who post “outstanding” scores and place among the top 50,000 students taking the exam. The top 16,000 in this category go on to be semifinalists.