QUESTION REGARDING CLUB HOURS.

Pre-College Topics High School Life
1

To start off, I was a Secretary for a high school club and I calculated and gave out volunteer hour certificates at the end of the year. Our club gives out hours based on attendance and occasional volunteer events.

So, I looked at the attendance and volunteering spreadsheets and quickly estimated a generous amount of hours for each person. I wasn’t accurate at all and gave people 5-10 more hours than they actually deserved.

However, I was surprised about how easy the whole process was. I just wrote down a number of hours on a piece of paper and that was it. I didn’t even have to enter the number of hours I gave out into any official club/school document.

So, my question is, how do colleges verify club hours? If a college tried to verify the club hours of one of my club members, it would be impossible for the school to do.

Would people be able to just lie and enter as many club hours as they want?

2

Most of the time, they won’t or can’t verify - some HS clubs do not keep track of hours, and mentioning what you did in the clubs on essays or elsewhere usually speaks more than # of hours.

Of course, if I logged 50 hrs/week for a single club over a long term, adcoms might get suspicious.

3

You just estimate for the Common App, unless you say something ridiculous colleges won’t care about verifying.