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Winners
How winning works.
Thousands of students enter each contest, and the Learning Network publishes the best. Here is how entries are judged, what winning work tends to share, and where to read the official results at the source.
01 · The judging
Who decides, and how.
Each contest is read by a panel of judges — Learning Network staff, Times journalists, and educators — against a published rubric specific to that contest. Entries are typically read in multiple rounds, with the strongest advanced and re-read before the final selections are made.
The results are grouped into tiers. A small number of winners are joined by a larger set of runners-up and honorable mentions, so many more students are recognized than the headline winner count suggests. Selected entries are published on nytimes.com.
- Winners
- The top entries in each contest, published and celebrated by the Learning Network.
- Runners-up
- Excellent entries just below the winners — a strong, named recognition.
- Honorable mentions
- A broad list of entries the judges admired; a meaningful credit for a college or activity résumé.
02 · What winning work shares
Patterns across the winners.
Read enough winning entries and the same qualities recur, whatever the medium. They take a small, specific subject seriously rather than a big abstract one. They have a clear voice — you can tell a person wrote them. They respect the form’s constraint and use it, rather than fighting it. And they have obviously been revised: nothing is wasted, and the ending lands.
The winners rarely have the biggest topic in the room — they have the most exact one.
The best way to internalize this is to read the real entries. We don’t republish them here, but you can read them on the official Learning Network announcements, which include the judges’ comments on why each was chosen.
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