<p>How significant of a role do Academic Honors and Awards play in the admissions process? I've been looking at the applications to various colleges, and pretty much all of them ask about this.</p>
<p>However, my school doesn't hand out ANY awards until graduation besides book awards (which only around 12 students get). We don't have an honor role, we don't have subject awards...nothing until your last day as a senior. In addition, as far as I know, I didn't qualify for national merit, and I only took 2 APs junior year, so no AP Scholar of any kind until I'm a senior either. As far as I can tell, I'll have no academic honors or awards until long after the college application process.</p>
<p>Is this something you have to have, or is it just a minor consideration in the application process since I still have good grades and SAT scores? Would it be terrible if this was completely blank on my applications? And also, is there something I could do to maybe get an outside of school award or whatnot, just something to put down...</p>
<p>I'm also wondering about this. My school doesn't give out awards either until end of senior year and I don't have anything either. Would something like being on the honor roll every semester in high school be considered an Academic honor or is that stretching it?</p>
<p>Most of the academic honors I can think of are from competitions.</p>
<p>So would winning an essay or poetry contest count? If so, does anyone know of something?</p>
<p>Any contests count. The Ayn Rand essay contest is well-known (very tough to win), but I'm not the person to ask about essay contests. Try looking at regional competitions.</p>
<p>Yeah, the Academic Honors and Rewards mostly come from competitions, from which there are actually quite a few to choose from, in any subject area you want. In math/science/CS, you can participate in the olympiads, or do research and try to get a prize that way. For English, there are national essay writing contests, for the more social studies oriented you have stuff like Model UN. For music, you can participate in the local, state or national contests in your instrument, perhaps with the prize of playing with an orchestra. And for those inclined, you can do Quiz Bowl/Academic Team, for those really interested this can end up really well.</p>
<p>As for the importance, I'd say at the really elite colleges, since the stats are almost the same (i.e. very high), colleges look at this sort of thing to see if you're a cut above the rest of the talented applicants in some way. If so, that's a reason to admit you.</p>
<p>I have an award then from newspaper in copy editting...would that count, or is that non-academic?</p>
<p>what about national honor society/national merit?</p>