The Liberal Arts Honors Program is not a major, but an enriched feature of the College’s core curriculum. As with regular students, Honors students are required to fulfill the demands of the core curriculum, in addition to the major, but they do so in special Honors sections which, to put it simply, require more reading, more writing, and more seminar participation.

Honors courses may be taken in almost every segment of the core curriculum: in the four-semester Western Civilization sequence, in Philosophy, Theology, the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts. Mathematics is the only segment of the core which does not offer an Honors section, and that is because students fulfill their mathematics requirement at those levels, usually some species of Calculus, appropriate to their particular math backgrounds.

No, except for the Western-Civilization sequence, they are not so required, although most students choose as many Honors core courses as their individual majors will allow. Ordinarily, they will take the four semesters of the Western-Civilization sequence in their freshman and sophomore years, and then spread the rest of their Honors courses over the four undergraduate years. These choices are always made after one-on-one consultation with the Director or Associate Director of the Honors Program during the Registration period.

The minimum number of Honors courses required, including the four in the Western Civilization sequence, is six, but most students end up taking eight to ten.

The minimum GPA is 3.25 in Honors courses and 3.25 overall.

Is there any grade “compensation” for the extra work involved in Honors?

Yes, Honors courses are rewarded with an additional 0.17 at each grade level, except for the ‘A’ which cannot earn more than the maximum 4.0.

Yes, in last year’s graduating class, for example, Honors students came from twelve different majors.

About half of the members of the current freshman Honors class decided to matriculate Undeclared. Our strong advisory system will, by no later than the end of the sophomore year, place all of them in majors appropriate to their interests.

There is no separate Honors residence arrangement. Honors classes, by definition, are separate, but for most students only one or, at the most, two courses per semester would be taken in an Honors mode. The rest would be taken in the regular program. So participation in the Program does not leave the Honors student isolated from normal campus life.

Perhaps a specific example would best serve here. In Honors Western Civilization courses, one major text is assigned per week–-accompanied by other inter-disciplinary readings. First- semester freshmen studying classical and Hebrew civilization, for instance, might be assigned Homer’s Odyssey one week, Aeschylus’ Oresteia the second week, the Book of Job and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex the third week, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars the fourth week and so on through four sequential semesters of the “Great Books’ regimen until history, themes, and titles reach contemporary times in the final semester of the sequence. Most of these works are read in their entirety, and each of them serves as the topic of a two-hour weekly seminar. Papers (at least four per semester) and essay examinations (at least two), plus weekly reading quizzes and a final essay examination, constitute the bulk of the written work.

How large are Honors classes?

Most Honors classes are seminar size: that is, fifteen students or fewer. Some have as few as nine and others as many as twenty. The only exceptions are Honors Western Civilization sections which are taught by three-professor teams and, therefore, designed for a compound of lectures (three hours a week) and seminars (two hours a week). The seminars usually accommodate twelve to fifteen students, and the lectures taught by three professors thirty to forty students.

The process is by invitation based on high school class standing, SAT scores, recommendations, essay samples, etc. Admittedly, the system is not infallible. There are some examples of students not invited who should have been and vice versa. However, after the first year and after appropriate interviews, the Director may extend invitations to those non-Honors freshmen who have been recommended by faculty or whose overall grades are spectacularly high. At any time, of course, a student may apply for admission simply by asking.

The Director is responsible for choosing the Honors faculty, almost all of whom have been invited because of stellar reputations in the classroom and most of whom have had years of experience therein. If you check their credentials on the Faculty page, you will notice the following:

One might argue that in the long run intellectual nourishment is the most practical of all possible benefits. But, more proximately, each graduating Honors student has his or her transcript inscribed with an Honors designation; each student is individually awarded an Honors certificate at separate Honors ceremonies at graduation time; and each Honors graduate is so identified in the Commencement Day program.

With respect to the practical connection between Honors study on the one hand and graduate work and employment on the other, it is perhaps our proudest boast that our graduates have been accepted by the very best Graduate, Law and Medical Schools worldwide since the first freshman Honors class arrived in 1957 and graduated in 1961. Our students have routinely matriculated in graduate programs at universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Penn, Oxford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Michigan, Indiana, Georgetown, Notre Dame, and too many more to fit in this space.