<p>This is one of my first posts on this forum, so bear with me please. I want to start a National Honor Society club at my high school, and I'm looking for advice from people who have ALREADY started one / is thoroughly involved in one. I know there's the official NHS website about starting a chapter, but I didn't really find it helpful other than for establishing the very basic requirements. </p>
<p>So my questions: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>How was your induction ceremony? Was it formal or informal? Guidelines specify that is must be "appropriate and impressive".</p></li>
<li><p>Did you require applicants to submit a copy of their transcript to make sure they're not lying about their GPA? Or is it OK to believe that their GPA is what they write on the application? If you did require students to submit a transcript, did you sort through the transcripts or did you have to have your 5-faculty member advisement board do it?</p></li>
<li><p>Is there some special way you recognized NHS members at graduation? We're thinking about buying some special cords for members.</p></li>
<li><p>What did you base the GPA on? For example, on last year's grades? This would exclude freshmen from becoming members though.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I really hope that this thread becomes informative for people looking to start a NHS club. With that in mind, please refrain from posting comments like "NHS is such a stupid club...everyone gets in" or "the requirements are so unfair! and it doesn't help with colleges at all!". Those were actually taken from previous online forums I found concerning NHS. :)</p>
Pretty formal. The lined all of us inductees up in alphabetical order, we sat in the auditorium with the NHS officers up on stage. Had a speaker about importance of character, integrity, and working hard, and then the NHS sponsor for our school spoke. Then we all got little candles that we lit for a second and took the oath or whatever. Then the president called us up one at a time and they handed us our certificates. The end. Everyone was in a dress/skirt/suit pretty much. </p>
<p>
At our school you automatically get in if you have at least a 3.5 GPA and no really bad record (e.g., no drug convictions), not really an application process. Guidance handles it, so it’s impossible to lie. If you have a 3.5+ then you get a letter in the mail and you have to return it signed to the sponsor. </p>
The NHS website says NHS is for 10-12th graders only, so that solves that. It was based on our cumulative GPA up until the 3rd nine weeks of our sophomore year at my school. </p>
<p>This was all just based on what my school does, it’s different for everyone.</p>
<p>I was inducted last year. Our induction was pretty formal; the previous year’s officers all spoke and so did the principal as well as NHS advisor. Getting in is also handled by the guidance office; at my school the minimum GPA is a 3.75, but only juniors and seniors are eligible to be inducted. </p>
<p>NHS members wear special tassels at graduation at my school; they’re gold instead of the usual blue and white that everyone else wears. Membership was based on our GPA up to the end of first semester of junior year, but of course students who didn’t qualify during their junior year can still be considered the next year.</p>
<p>It seems like your NHS is run mainly through the school, which is pretty nice. However, at my school, it would be the students’ efforts along with that of the five member faculty board. I can expect little help from the faculty, however, as this will be a new club. Anyone else have advice if I’m expected to sort through the applications and plan the induction ceremony by myself with minimal help from the advisement board?</p>
<p>I was wondering then if a student doesn’t qualify for membership during their senior year, but they qualified in their junior and sophomore years, then would that student still be eligible to wear the tassel?</p>
<p>Why?
NHS for the sake of NHS has always seemed pretty pointless to me (regardless of how many people get in…at a lot of schools it seems to serve no purpose other than to create exclusivity).
I mean, some NHS chapters do meaningful service work, but if that’s your goal you may as well just start a group for that specifically.</p>
<p>I’m not in NHS, but here’s what they do at my school:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Relatively informal IMO. The inductees wear black gowns over their clothes and stand onstage, and they get some random kid to play the piano. It’s always the same song every year. </p></li>
<li><p>Only students whose GPA is known to be above 3.2 unweighted are allowed to apply in the first place.</p></li>
<li><p>Not sure.</p></li>
<li><p>Whatever their unweighted GPA was at the time they applied. Only juniors and seniors can be members of NHS, and people apply at the beginning of their junior year.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>@chaostheory13: No, I don’t believe so. Obviously the GPA has to be maintained to remain a member, so I’d assume that if a member could not perform to the academic standard and was unable to maintain the 3.75, then he/she would probably lose NHS status. I have never heard of this happening at my school, though.</p>
<p>My school’s chapter also requires us to do community service hours (at least 15). It would be a lot for you to coordinate, if you wished to incorporate that into your school’s chapter.</p>
<p>I want to start a NHS club because our school doesn’t really recognize any academic achievement beyond our CSF program. For those of you unfamiliar with CSF, it’s a California-based organization that takes into account one’s GPA and number of volunteer hours. However, I have found that most people outside of California have no clue as to what CSF entails. Therefore students in my high school who wish to apply to out of state colleges are seriously disadvantaged.</p>
<p>Do you have a president or some student body in charge of NHS? Or is it strictly run through your administration with little input from students?</p>
<p>They still have a GPA and test scores, no? I just really can’t believe anyone is disadvantaged in college admissions because they’re not a member of some club. Colleges can make their own judgments about whether someone has academic merit based on their actual accomplishments.</p>
<p>(Also, the purpose of NHS isn’t necessarily to recognize academic achievement. From what I could tell from the process at my school, it was more about ECs/leadership than anything else. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not really about academics…there’s just a minimum academic standard you have to meet.)</p>
<p>We have five student officers that are elected by NHS members to represent us and work with the NHS faculty adviser. The adviser and officers work together with the administration.</p>
<p>I appreciate your input. I can only speak from my own experience as well as from what my family and friends have told me. While I do not believe that NHS is a deal-breaker with colleges, I do feel that students who can claim acceptance to NHS, a nationally recognized organization, have an advantage as opposed to other students who are recognized merely by a state program. </p>
<p>With this in mind, I would like to steer the conversation back towards my earlier questions about establishing the club.</p>
<p>My point is that colleges have access to the same information about you that the gods of NHS do when they make their decisions. A college doesn’t need to know that NHS thinks your grades/ECs are good to know that they’re good.
Other awards/honors might be more relevant if they say something about you that isn’t already apparent from the other information on the app.</p>
<p>I respect your opinion, but I would like to point out that the intention of this thread is to answer any questions about starting a NHS club NOT to debate whether or not such a club is vital to college admissions. </p>
<p>Nobody knows exactly what goes on behind rejecting or accepting a college application–we can only do the best with what we are given. </p>
<p>I would be interested in hearing more about how your NHS club was established and how it runs today, halcyonheather.</p>
<p>I absolutely agree with you in that the reasons for doing something are just as important as the work itself. </p>
<p>Do you know if tutoring is mandatory to become a member of the club? And if so, how do the leaders/teachers in charge of NHS verify that everyone is doing their required hours?</p>
<p>It’s not mandatory to become a member (you only start tutoring once you’re already in), but at my school you’ll get kicked out if you don’t fulfill your responsibility to do tutoring a couple times a month or so.
Different schools use NHS for different purposes…not all of them require tutoring. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>People sign up for specific hours in advance, and the teachers can tell if they didn’t show up when they were supposed to.</p>
<p>So is your NHS run similarly to gobluedevils’s in that there’s a board of students assisting administration? Or is it primarily run by students?</p>
<p>Also how many people would you estimate to be members of the NHS club?</p>