The National Honor Society Selection Process

Any junior or senior who has a GPA of 3.70 or above is invited to apply for admittance into NHS. Applications are handed out to these students with instructions for completion and deadline information. This application packet includes an application for the student to complete, 3 teacher recommendation forms for the student to give to three teachers he or she feels know him/her best, and documentation forms for community service, leadership and activity.

Once these forms are all received by the Chapter adviser, they are then scored by a five member NHS advisory committee. They score these using the rubric, and they do so independently without consulting each other. This rubric has a 50 point total. The 50 points are divided up as follows:

• 5 points based on the 3 teacher recommendations. This is completely objective as it requires just adding up the scores from the 3 recommendations and giving points based on a predetermined scale.
• 3 points based on GPA- since all students have a 3.70 or higher, they are all awarded the full 3 points for scholarship.
• 5 points for leadership- these points are awarded based on the leadership activity described on the leadership documentation sheet as well as the feedback from the sponsor who completed this sheet. The rubric provides some basis for breaking this down on a 5 point scale but there is some subjective judgement involved (as it inevitably will be no matter how hard we try to keep this out of the decision making process).
• 5 points for service- these points are awarded based in the community service described on the community service documentation sheet as well as feedback from the sponsor who competed this sheet. Points are also awarded based on the rubric.
• 2 points for service length- these are based on the number of hours of community service described on the community service documentation sheet
• 5 points for activity- points awarded in a similar manner to leadership and service
• 10 points for the student portion of the application- these are based on how well written and well thought out answers were on the application sheet
• 10 points for the student potions of the activity, leadership, and community service sheets- in these sections the student had to describe how these activities would help them to be good members of NHS
• 5 points based on the recommendation scores of the entire faculty. Every member of the faculty is given a sheet asking about the qualities outlined by the national NHS chapter and asking them to rate each candidate on these qualities. Teachers are not required to fill these out and do not fill them out for students they do not know. This is also a set amount of points based on a predetermined scale.

Once the five advisory committee members have completed scoring, they give the sheets to the adviser to total. The council will then meet- the five members of the advisory committee and the adviser. The scores are discussed to make sure there are no discrepancies or major disagreements between scores. All members of this committee take this responsibility very seriously and there are many discussions about their desire to remain objective with their scores.