Are scholarships mainly about your marks/average or your community/school involvement?

Question

Like if you had a 97 average or something but you weren't involved in anything would you have a better or worse chance at getting a scholarship than someone with a 90 average but are in a bunch of community/school events.

Answer 1

It depends on the scholarship, some are academia oriented and some are service orientated. Most, however, revolve around your life and just require you write an essay about some particular moment of your life, so having a good grade average probably means you can write well enough to have a chance. 90 and 97 aren't that different, but if the 90 has more experience in the community he will probably have more scholarships available to apply for while the 97 will probably have less.

Answer 2

Depends what kind of scholarship you're applying for.

Outside of the scholarships offered by the school (which are more  grade/test score based), most of them (the private organization ones)look at your involvement outside of school. There are usually a lot that focus on community service, extracurriculars, and sometimes they'll ask you to write about these activities. Some scholarships will use grades as the initial cutoff though.

So to answer your question, the latter person would probably get the scholarship, as his/her grades are still decent AND they have extracurriculars.