what is unconditional offer in terms of scholarship from a university?

Answer 1

Normally, the opposite term is used: "Conditional Offer" or "Conditional Acceptance." Did you misread the sentence?

Essentially, to say that an offer is "conditional" would be to say that that there are additional requirements that must be met before you can be guaranteed the scholarship. In other words, the offer is "contingent" on you doing something or on your school receiving some information about you.

Now, it's nothing to worry about; in fact, it happens all the time. For example, a school might offer a new student a scholarship based on his/her high school academic recommendations or unofficial transcript. However, to guarantee that the student really is as good as s/he appeared to be on his/her admission application, the school needs to see the student's official, final high school transcript. In this case, they might make their scholarship offer "conditional" until they receive the transcript.

"Conditional offers" happen a lot in financial aid because, often, schools are forced to make financial aid awards before they have received all the information that they need to *really* award the student. For example, they might need tax information, transcripts, deposits, housing information, enrollment verification, immunization records -- all sorts of things need to be double-checked before you can become a student and receive your award.

OK, so if your offer really was "unconditional," then you can pretty much assume that you're going to get the scholarship no matter what you do... (As I said, this is unlikely to be the case at most schools.)