Your Students Want a Mu Alpha Theta Chapter. Here’s Your First Year.

What do you tell two juniors who stop by after class and ask you to start a Mu Alpha Theta chapter? They’ve heard about the national convention. You open the website and find a petition portal, a fee per member, a list of course requirements and a 38-page convention packet full of forms that need a notary. You are the only adult in the building who can sign any of it, and you already teach five sections.

Some sponsors run the chapter as an honor roll: induct the eligible students in spring, order the cords, done until next year. Others build it around the summer trip from day one, because the convention is the exciting part of the site.

A certificate-only chapter has nothing to do between inductions, and a chapter that registers no new members for more than two years goes inactive and has to stop using the name. The convention-first chapter starts budgeting for $600 per student and $600 per adult, with forms and payment postmarked by May 1, before anyone in the room has sat a single Mu Alpha Theta test. And a petition you start in the spring and never finish is deleted every July.

My advice is to found the chapter on the honor-society side, put one free at-home contest on the calendar and treat the national convention as a year-two decision.

What Is Mu Alpha Theta, and What Are You Signing Up For?

Mu Alpha Theta is the National High School and Two-Year College Mathematics Honor Society, formed in 1957 at the University of Oklahoma. A school’s chapter inducts students who meet its math requirements, and the society runs contests that chapters take at their own school (the Log1 Contest, the Rocket City Math League and the Mathematical Minutes Video Contest), plus a national convention each summer.

The sponsor’s job is mostly logistics. The society’s handbook asks you to provide a supervised meeting space, check grades for eligibility and submit new members. You also tell students about scholarships and take them to competitions, which means arranging chaperones, transport and permission forms. Students can’t apply on their own, so every membership goes through you.

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Does Your School Qualify, and Which Students Count?

A high school can petition if it offers at least two years of algebra and one year of geometry (or their equivalent) plus at least one year of more advanced math, and general math, business math or arithmetic courses don’t count toward that. The school also needs at least one teacher whose main field is math and who has a math major or its equivalent, which the society defines as at least six college math courses at the calculus level or above.

Then sort your interested students into two groups.

	Member	Associate
Grades	9–12	9–12
Math completed	Two years of college-prep math (algebra and/or geometry), plus a third year completed or in progress	One year of algebra completed with distinction, now in a higher course
Grade bar	Math GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4-point scale	No GPA figure; the algebra year must be completed with distinction
Fee	One-time membership fee	No initiation fee
Can enter the society’s national contests	Yes	Yes
How long	For life	One year, then inducted if eligible

Your chapter can set stricter standards than the national ones but not lower ones. And associates are your bridge for strong ninth graders: they can compete before they meet the course requirement.

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What Does It Take to File the Petition?

The petition is a short job if you gather everything first.

1. Get your principal’s approval.
2. Line up at least five founding members.
3. File the petition yourself on the society’s online portal (only teachers can).
4. Pay the fees by check or credit card; a purchase order won’t work.
5. Wait for approval from the society’s president and your region’s governor.

The member fee is $12 per new member from August 1, 2026, so a five-member start costs at least $60. The high school page also lists a $25 chapter fee with the petition, next to an older $10 member rate, so budget up to $85 and confirm the total with the national office. Title I schools get a reduced per-member rate, and since the society’s pages list both $5 and $6, ask the national office for the current figure. A credit card isn’t charged until the Governing Council approves the charter. If your region declines, the school can appeal to the Governing Council, where approval takes a two-thirds vote.

The fee is one time. Each member gets a certificate and a membership card and stays a member for life.

Keeping the chapter alive is where new sponsors slip. You register each new member within one month of their initiation. A chapter that submits no new members for more than two years becomes inactive, and bringing it back costs $25 plus $12 per member. In practice that means one induction every spring, even a small one.

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Which Contest Should Your Chapter Try First?

Start with something your students can take in your own classroom. Here are the options the society runs or points to.

Contest	Where it happens	Cost	Fits a first-year chapter?
Log1 Contest	At your school, against students with a similar course background	Free	Yes, and it returns in 2026–27
Rocket City Math League (RCML)	At your school; you register, proctor and enter scores	Free	Yes, it has a level for every course from pre-algebra up
Mathematical Minutes Video Contest	Students make a 2–5 minute math video, up to three per school	Free	Yes, for the students who’d rather explain than race
State affiliate meets (Louisiana, Florida’s FAMAT, Mississippi)	Regional and state competitions	Set by the affiliate	Yes, if you’re in one of those states
Outside contests on the society’s list	Run by universities and other groups, by state	Varies	Later, once you know your strongest students

RCML is the easiest first step for a mixed room. Its spring individual round is three 30-minute tests of 10 questions each. There are five levels: Explorer (pre-algebra), Mercury (Algebra I), Gemini (geometry), Apollo (Algebra II) and Discovery (precalculus and up). There is also a 15-question Interschool Test that a team works on together. The society hasn’t posted 2026–27 dates for RCML or Log1 yet, so check its contests page before you promise a date.

Florida sponsors have more choice than anyone. The Florida Association of Mu Alpha Theta (FAMAT) runs regional and statewide competitions, including its annual State Convention, and it keeps a public test bank. The society’s regional contest list also includes the M3 Challenge and HMMT. If you have juniors and seniors who like open-ended problems, read whether the M3 Challenge fits your juniors and seniors before you sign them up for a timed tournament.

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Is the National Convention Worth It in Year One?

For most new chapters, no, unless a grant pays for the trip.

The 2027 National Convention runs July 18–23, 2027, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Registration is $600 per registered student and $600 per registered adult, with no refunds, and the forms and payment must be postmarked by May 1, 2027. The convention-grants page still names Orlando for 2027, but the convention page and the sponsor packet both say Lincoln. Online registration opens in early 2027; the society lists both February 1 and March 1, so check the convention page. After that, the convention moves to Las Vegas in 2028, Orlando in 2029 and Frisco in 2030.

Every student competes in one of three divisions, set by the math course they’re enrolled in as of May 1, 2027.

Division	Who it’s for
Theta	Completed Geometry and/or Algebra 2, not yet in a higher course
Alpha	Past Algebra 2 (precalculus), never enrolled in calculus
Mu	Taking or has taken calculus

Theta is the entry division and Mu is the top one, so most first-year members will sit Theta. Students may move up a division for many events, though not for the Individual Test, Ciphering or School Bowl. Open topic tests take students from any division. No calculators are allowed on any test except the Open Statistics topic test.

Alongside the Individual Test there are more than a dozen other sweepstakes events. They range from Ciphering and topic tests to School Bowl, Chalk Talk, Hustle, two relays and a Math Bowl, and each one feeds the school’s sweepstakes score. A few extras, such as the two-person Gemini test, don’t count toward it.

If you do go, let the 2027 sweepstakes table shape your practice: the three division events (the Individual Test, Ciphering and School Bowl) carry about 42% of the weight and the topic tests about 36%. The Individual Test is 30 multiple-choice questions in 60 minutes, scored 5 points for a correct answer, 1 for a blank and 0 for a wrong one. Ciphering is 12 open-response questions at 3 minutes each. So a small chapter’s practice time belongs on those two events, in each student’s own division, before anyone worries about the poster.

The society offers a limited number of $4,000 grants to chapters that have never attended a national convention. A grant covers registration for at least three members and a sponsor, and you need three or more eligible students who aren’t graduating seniors. Applications open February 1, 2027 and are due April 1, 2027, and only sponsors can apply. The sponsor of any attending chapter can also nominate up to two members for a need-based scholarship that covers registration, a shared room for the five nights and up to $300 of travel. If a grant comes through and you have three keen Theta students, go. If not, year two is soon enough.

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What Money Can the Chapter Bring In?

More than most sponsors expect, and most of it needs your signature.

What	Up to	For	Deadline or rule
Chapter grant	$1,000 per chapter	Chapter projects	First come, first served; sponsors apply
Competition grant	$500 per chapter	Costs of taking part in a math competition (not the national convention)	First come, first served; sponsors apply
Summer grant	$2,000 per student	Summer math programs or research	Members only
Member scholarship	$4,000	Graduating seniors and two-year college members	Up to two nominees per chapter; due February 1, 2027
Huneke Award	$2,000	A sponsor’s long service	Due June 15
Regional Sponsor of the Year	$1,000	A sponsor in each region	Due March 15

The competition grant is the one to use in year one. It can pay entry fees for a state or regional meet, which gives your students a day away from school without the convention’s price.

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Your First-Year Plan on One Page

This is the whole year, in the order the deadlines arrive.

When	What you do	Why then
October	Check the school and teacher requirements; list students as members or associates	Everything else depends on it
November	Principal’s approval, five founding members, file and pay the petition	Unfinished petitions are deleted every July
Winter	Induct, register members within a month, enter Log1 or RCML	Free, at your school
February 1 – April 1, 2027	Decide on the convention; apply for a first-time grant if you have three keen students	Grant window
Spring	Induct again, even if only two students qualify	Keeps the chapter active

That’s the payoff: a chapter that exists on paper by winter, has one real contest behind it by spring, and has made the convention decision with the grant dates in hand instead of on a hunch.

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Related guides

• Our guide to the American Regions Math League
• What HMMT asks of a high school team
• How AMC 10 and AMC 12 differ

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