well, there are 7 ranks, scout, tenderfoot, 2nd class, 1st class, stare, life, and eagle. scout it nothing, you basically just have to join a troop and know the basic stuff about scouting. for tenderfoot, 2nd class, and 1st class you have to do a lot of requirments like knots, first aid, cooking, and so on. there's 2 pages of requirments for each of them. for star you need 6 merit badges, 2 of which need to be eagle required (much harder to earn), you need to spend 6 hours of servis hours working, and be active in the troop for 6 months. life is the same, but you need more eagle required badges, which are usually harder than the ones you already got. getting eagle is also the same except for one very big factor, the service project. you have to plan, organise, and complete a service project where there has to be at least 100 hours put into it. mine had 128 hours in it. then you have to put together this big binder full of everything you did to complete the project, essays on what you did, calculated time, anything you recieved during it, and so on. it was by far the hardest thing i've ever done in my life.
I've seen the pictures from the day they received their awards. 
