Greensboro, NC - Sixteen students from five Guilford County schools have been named as semifinalists in the 69th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

GCS semifinalists are listed by school below.

Early College at Guilford

 - Dishita Agarwal
 - Benjamin Hoffman
 - Jiyu Hong
 - Lakshya Mehta
 - Elijah Menser
 - Sean Raften
 - John Saunders
 - Arihant Singh
 - Rou Tan
 - Timothy Vo

Grimsley High

 - Austin Setzler
 - Claire Smith

Northern High

 - Aaric Gray

Page High

 - Alisha Mittal
 - Priyanka Mittal
 
Penn-Griffin School for the Arts

 - Sophia Soto

These students are among more than 16,000 semifinalists in the nation, most of whom will go on to become finalists by completing an application. About half of the finalists will win a National Merit Scholarship, earning the Merit Scholar title.

Students qualify for the National Merit Scholarship by taking the Pre-SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT) as juniors. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, representing 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.