The Best High School Model UN Teams standings are determined by awards won at the most competitive conferences in the United States and by head-to-head matchups between schools attending the same conferences.
We used conference size as a proxy for prestige and competitiveness – winning Best Delegation awards or even performing well at larger conferences are weighted more heavily into the standings. We weighted conferences by three tiers: Most Competitive (1,500+ delegates), Large (1,000-1,500 delegates), and Regional (500-1,000 delegates that are the most competitive in a geographic region or are notably competitive). The list of conferences in each tier is listed below. We only counted conferences that are hosted by colleges and non-profit organizations – we did not have enough data to consider conferences hosted by high schools.
We valued delegation awards in this order: Best Large, Outstanding Large, Best Small, and Outstanding Small. Delegation awards won at the more competitive conference tiers carry more weight. Conferences that published their full list of award winners gave us better data to work with and will be more influential in the standings – schools that did not win delegation awards but had many award winners are counted as winning “3rd place,” “4th place,” and so forth.
In our analysis of the 40 largest conferences that have taken place by March 21st, 2011, we were able to determine over 90 high school MUN teams that have consistently won awards so far this year. Since we have awards results and head-to-head matchups from six of the seven Most Competitive conferences, delegation award winners and top performing schools at those conferences as well as Best Large Delegation award winners from the Large conferences will populate all of the Top 25 standings.
Tier Breakdown
Most Competitive: We looked at the 40 largest conferences in the United States and sorted them by size. We determined that the seven largest conferences with over 1,500 delegates each are also the most competitive conferences in the nation. The awards won at these conferences are thus weighted more heavily than awards won at any other conference. Since we have visited each conference and have good head-to-head data, we were able sort these conferences in order of strength of competition:
- Harvard HMUN
- Nationals NHSMUN
- Georgetown NAIMUN
- U.Chicago MUNUC
- U.Penn ILMUNC
- Berkeley BMUN
- UNA-USA’s GCIMUN
Large: The next set of conferences is those with 1,000-1,500 delegates, and awards won at these conferences are weighted more heavily than awards won at Regional conferences. These in alphabetical order are:
- Boston University BosMUN
- Brown BUSUN
- George Washington WAMUNC
- Johns Hopkins JHUMUNC
- Rutgers RUMUN
- UCLA BruinMUN
- William & Mary WMHSMUN
- Yale YMUN
Regional: In our analysis of the 40 largest conferences, we made sure to take note of conferences that have 500-1,000 delegates but may be the most competitive conference available in the region including but not limited to:
- Texas CTMUN
- Duke DUMUNC
- Michigan State MSUMUN
- Florida High Schools FHSMUN
- RHSMUN in Utah
- Virginia VAMUN
- Georgia Tech GTMUN
We also noted in the same category conferences that are not large and not the most competitive in the region but are attended by competitive high school teams, and these include Cornell CMUNC, Columbia CMUNCE, and Illinois-Chicago CIMUN.
