Induction

Joining Academics Club is a somewhat stressful experience that I did not have to go through since I did not have parents at the time, nor did I have to prove myself as a potential superhero. But I'm told it's stressful.
Part of it is that you don't really find AC, it finds you. Someone else already associated with the club in some fashion carefully susses out whether or not you have powers, and if you do then they have to figure out if you already have a suitable mentorship available to you, or if you need or want one. It's a lot of sussing. So much. But that's all pre-induction.
It's primarily intended as a way to introduce the teens in the club to the superhero community, to the unspoken customs and traditions of how it works. It's a transition between normal life and...whatever this life is. Different normal.
First step is the establishing meeting, where someone meets your parents. Sometimes the parents know what their kids are doing, sometimes not. You're not even invited until you're past sixteen so there's no legal requirement to tell them what the club really is. In some cases it's actually frowned upon because of the identities of the other kids. It's one thing to know your kid has powers. It's another to know the secret identities of a dozen others.
So the meeting happens, there's a little bit of telepathic mind wiping in some cases, and permission for the more public parts of the club are granted.
The next step depends. If you've already got the signs of some delinquency, you're just signed up. Otherwise, the club takes a few weeks to set things up so it looks like you're taking a turn for the worse so it makes sense that you'll be stuck in this club.
Then you get the first meeting. It's boring. It's meant to play out exactly like how AC supposedly goes in the first place, operating under the assumption that you are a troubled teen whose parents have stuck you in a motivational club to help turn your life around.
Once you've shown that you can tolerate the less glamorous parts of a secret identity, then you're tested. They always tell you that it's possible to fail, but it's more of a metric to see where you're at with your abilities and how comfortable you are with your powers.