How much should poster/talk prizes be spread at a symposium?
I am a volunteer with the IEEE in Connecticut, USA.  Each year, we give prizes to EE-related projects at the Connecticut Science &amp; Engineering Fair at Quinnipiac University. This is a fair for High School students (mostly) to present their projects.

What we do is award a first place for each of the Senior and Junior sections of the fair. This prize is worth $200.  Then we award $100 prizes to 6 other students as "Honorable Mentions".  These other six tend to be 3 for the Seniors and 3 for the Juniors, but it depends on the relative quality of each pool.



To answer your question is a little hard. Here is the full list of science project abstracts at this year's fair. Not all of those (or even half) are EE-related. My guess is that we'd start with a list of about 100 projects (50 each in Senior vs Junior) and then make a determination from there.