The whole process of a scholarship election is a very interesting one. Rather than scholarships being handed out by institutions, agencies and the government, with a scholarship election, students are directly in charge of who gets scholarship money. How it works is quite simple: the students who are interested in earning scholarship money sign up to participate in a monthly debate. The debate can consist of many different topics, such as abortion, religion, politics and science, and as students debate with one another, they earn votes from each other and give votes to each other. When the debate is over, those students who have the most votes win scholarship money. Note that I said that this is a monthly debate, so at the end of each debate and winning of scholarship money, a new debate for scholarship money starts all over again.

Students who participate are kept in the know of who among them is winning, thanks to a real time list that highlights the top point earners throughout the debate. As you can imagine, at the end of each debate things start to get really tense, as debates become more heated and the need to earn more points becomes more and more important.

What makes the scholarship election process so different from regular scholarship proceedings is that for once, students know exactly what is going on and who is going to get scholarship money. Furthermore, students actually learn – learn both intellectually and socially – while they’re debating for the scholarship money.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.