Do academic competitions help college admissions?

AAdmissions readers spend much of their time on calibration, because an A in chemistry at one high school is not the same as an A at another, and a club president at a school of four hundred is not the same as one at a school of four thousand. In the Stanford office we learned from, readers were constantly judging how legitimate an activity was and what a credential really meant.

Competitions were valued there for a specific reason: they are about as standardized a data point as a reader ever gets. Families tend to think only of the famous contests, and students who would never qualify for one assume the category is closed to them. It is wider than that, and there is more than one way in.