Since you have a lot of experience, I was wondering which category is harder to place in: personal memoir or short story?
i donāt know how qualified i am to answer this, so take my response w/ a grain of salt. really, this answer is mostly based on what i can find on the website, not as much personal experience. (this is my first year submitting to scholastic lol.) if you refer to the online galleries of the scholastic art/writing website, you would see that for the 2020 competition, ~160 people received national medals in short story and ~190 for personal essay. iām not sure how much that says, though, ā i think how many people are commended for each category depends on how many submissions there are, so by this, we can assume that more people submit to personal essay than short story. thus, the amount of people commended from one category to the next, the change shouldnāt be drastic. as a note though, i believe poetry gets the most submissions (since a lot of people submit multiple poems), but then again, there is a higher number of awards awarded for poetry, as opposed to, say, novel writing (which gets very few submissions yearly.)
in addition, different categories have different judges, and the judges change every year. some groups of judges may sway toward certain styles and themes in writing, which again, makes it harder to tell whether one category is āharderā to be commended in than another.
there are a lot of other factors, too,
personally, i donāt think the selectiveness of art and writing should stop ANYONE from submitting. the adjudication process, to any extent, can be pretty confusing and unpredictable, so avoid taking it personally if a piece of writing or art doesnāt recieve an awardāthere are so many talented, amazing individuals who donāt recieve awards. at the end of the day, itās just a competition, but if you are successful, then congrats!!
good luck!!! 
To confirm, can we submit multiple sets of poems, multiple fictions, multiple critical essays, etc, within a given year as long as we pay the appropriate fee?
@math mastermind yeaaa i think thats what it says on the website
heyyyyy so does anyone know if i need to get a teacher to sign any forms? i wrote everything over summer without a teacher instructing meā¦but I think I read somewhere this is required?
if so, what forms do I need him to sign? how many do I need, and do i need to give him one form for each piece i submit, or one form total? is he required to read my work, or is it ok to just ask him to sign the form? whats the form even for?
also how do i send them to him? i canāt even find the forms on the website, maybe Iām searching in the wrong place?
thanks!!
Hey guys, started a new thread!