Queen's Chancellor's Scholarship: Application and Questions
The Queen’s Chancellor’s Scholarship is the rare big Canadian entrance award that tells you the questions in advance. Queen’s posts a practice version of the Major Admission Award application every October with, in its own words, the exact questions that will appear online, and the 2027-2028 version is already up. That turns a lottery into something you can prepare: a school nomination, two 2,500-character answers, a one-page creative document and one reference. Here are the mechanics for the 2027 entry year, what each part is scoring, six practice prompts, a worked answer, and the mistakes that cost nominees the award.
The award and the mechanics, as Queen’s publishes them
The Chancellor’s is the flagship of Queen’s Major Admission Awards (MAAs). Everything here comes from the official page and the 2027-2028 practice application, checked September 2026.
- Value. $48,000, paid as $12,000 a year for four years, renewable on a 3.5 GPA. Fifty are awarded.
- Eligibility. A 90 percent or higher average; Canadian citizen, permanent resident or Protected Person; entering first year of any undergraduate program. Second-year CEGEP students may apply. Recipients cannot hold Queen’s other merit scholarships.
- Nomination. Required, from your high school. Schools with fewer than 250 graduating students name one nominee; 250 to 499, up to two; 500 or more, up to three. Gap-year students are nominated by their former school. You do not fill in the form: when you select the School Nomination category, Queen’s emails your High School Official, who records whether you were chosen. Follow up with them yourself.
- Where and when. The MAA application lives in SOLUS, which you only get after applying to Queen’s, so the page says apply through OUAC by November 20 and submit the MAA application by December 8, 2026. Results are viewable in late February.
- Selection. Queen’s says the awards recognise “superior academic ability, creative and original thinking, involvement in school or community activities, and proven leadership.” No interview is mentioned on the page or in the practice application; this is a paper competition.
What the application actually asks
Five parts plus your transcript. Two are tables; three carry the award.
- Major awards, academic competitions and conferences since September 2023: name and description in 100 characters or less, plus the year. No acronyms.
- Extracurricular activities and employment. Five activities “that you are most proud of and that exemplify your leadership, and engagement in school/community service”: a 100-character description, a 20-character role, years, hours in a single year, paid or not. Queen’s says employment “is viewed as equally important”; a shift-lead job belongs here.
- Involvement in school and/or community, 2,500 characters including spaces: “Provide us with an example of your volunteerism in your school or community. What was the impact of your involvement? What was your motivation to engage in this? How will your past experiences, relating to volunteerism, lead to continued service while at Queen’s?”
- Leadership, 2,500 characters: “As part of an experience where you demonstrated your leadership, what challenges did you encounter? How did you respond and what did you learn about leadership from this experience.”
- Original and/or creative thinking: a one-page attachment, under 4 MB, that demonstrates “in your own way” how you meet that criterion. It is scaled to letter paper, “may be photocopied in black/white,” and cannot be video or audio.
- One letter of reference, not from a family member, dated and signed, which you upload yourself. Only one reaches the committee.
Two answers of 2,500 characters is roughly 800 words. There is no catch-all; a story that does not answer one of the two questions or fit on the creative page is not in your application.
Reading the two long questions
The volunteerism question has four parts and readers notice when one is missing: the example, the impact, the motivation, and the continuation at Queen’s. Most drafts nail the first, wave at the second, skip the third and invent the fourth. Impact means something changed for someone else, with a number or a name. Motivation is the specific irritation that made you act, not “I have always been passionate about helping.” Continuation is hardest; answer it with a habit you will keep anywhere, not a plan.
The leadership question is built around challenges; an answer where nothing went wrong is not answering it. The reader wants a decision made under pressure, a person who disagreed or dropped out, a plan that had to change, and a lesson specific enough to be checkable rather than “communication is key.” The leadership questions guide has the full method: leadership means people did something because of you, and the challenge is what it cost.
The creative page
This is the part nobody knows how to prepare for and the part most likely to separate fifty scholars from nominees with the same average. The published constraints are design rules: it is read on paper, possibly in black and white, so anything that needs colour or a screen is a risk, and one page means one idea. “In your own way” is an invitation to choose a form: a short piece of writing, a design with a caption on the problem it solves, a proof, a project-log page with a note on what you changed and why. The committee is scoring original thinking, so the page needs a problem and your unusual route through it. A pretty page with no problem in it is decoration.
Six practice prompts
Draft to the real questions. These are AcceptMe’s practice prompts, written to the same criteria, for building the stories you will choose between. Write each at 2,500 characters.
- Describe one volunteer commitment you kept for more than a year. What did it look like in the first month and what did it look like in the last, and what changed in between because of you?
- Tell us about a time you led a group that did not want to be led. What did you do in the first meeting, and what would the most sceptical member say about you now?
- What is the most useful thing you have built, organized or changed for people other than yourself? Who uses it now?
- Describe a leadership decision you got wrong. Who paid for it, how did you find out, and what do you do differently?
- What is a problem in your school or community that everyone accepts as normal, and what is the small unusual thing you did about it?
- What are you doing this year that you expect to still be doing at Queen’s, and why does it matter to you that it continues?
A worked answer to the leadership question
Written to the published leadership question at about 2,350 characters.
In Grade 11 I became head of the stage crew for our school musical: eleven students, two weeks of tech rehearsals and a drama teacher who trusted us to run lighting and sound ourselves. The first challenge was that six of the eleven were in Grade 9 and had never touched a lighting board, and the second was that the two Grade 12s who knew the board did not want to teach it. They wanted to run it, which is more fun.
My first response was wrong. I made a rota that put the Grade 12s on the board for every rehearsal and gave the Grade 9s the jobs nobody wanted, because that got us through the first week without mistakes. By the end of that week three of the Grade 9s had stopped showing up, and Ms. Patel asked me why my crew was shrinking. I had optimized for the rehearsal instead of for the crew.
The second week I changed two things. Every rehearsal, one Grade 9 sat on the board with a Grade 12 beside them and ran a scene, and the rule was that the Grade 12 could talk but not touch. And I asked the three who had left to come back, individually, and told them the new rule. Two did. The first night a Grade 9 ran the whole second act, the Grade 12s complained that it was slower and less polished. It was. It was also the point.
What I learned about leadership is that the thing that feels like competence, doing it with the people who already can, is often the opposite of the job. The job was to leave a crew that could run the show next year without me. This year the head of crew is one of the Grade 9s I nearly lost, and I found out because she messaged me asking where I had put the spare DMX cables. I would rather have that message than a smoother first week.
It answers every part of the published question in order: the experience, two challenges, a first response that failed, the changed response, and a lesson that is a specific reversal rather than a slogan. It has a person who disagreed, a number that went down and came back, and a last line the reader could verify.
Mistakes that cost nominees
- Not confirming the nomination. You select the School Nomination category, but the official decides whether you are the nominee. Ask your guidance office in September how they choose, and follow up.
- Applying to Queen’s late. No OUAC application by November 20 means no SOLUS access and no MAA application by December 8, 2026. The two deadlines are one deadline.
- Treating the tables as prose. One hundred characters is a label. Save the story for the long answers.
- A leadership answer with no challenge. The question asks for one in its first sentence. A story where the plan worked is a story about being in charge.
- Skipping the continuation. The volunteerism question ends by asking how service continues at Queen’s. Leaving it off reads as not having read it.
- A reference who does not know the award. Give your referee the practice application and your two answers.
Where to go from here
The Loran and Schulich guide covers the other big awards you can run in parallel. The Queen’s Commerce guide matters if you are applying to Commerce, because the PSE will tempt you to reuse the Chancellor’s leadership story. The failure-answer guide shows how to write the wrong-turn paragraph the leadership question is really asking for. If community leadership is your strongest line, the TD Community Leadership Scholarship guide covers where that file goes now the award has ended, and the Western National Scholarship guide is the other nominated award on the same calendar. And when the draft is done, AcceptMe’s essay coach will read it against the published question and pin a note to each sentence, tagged works, tighten or fix, without writing a word for you; two reviews are free, and the full coach is C$49 a month, cancel any time.
Keep reading
- Scholarship Essays and Interviews: Loran, Schulich, More How Canada's big entrance awards actually judge applicants, the questions they ask, and how to prepare essays and interview answers.
- Queen's Commerce Supplementary Application: PSE and Video What the Queen's Commerce PSE essay is really asking, the timed written and video format, fifteen practice questions and a worked two-minute answer.
- Leadership Interview Questions for Students (With Answers) How to answer leadership interview questions without a title: eight common questions, two sample answers and what admissions actually listens for.