5) An “Honors Program”
by Reverend ~ January 29th, 2010
The chairs have given serious consideration to the development of an “Honors Program” as a tool for attracting and retaining high-quality students. How can we develop a program that would bring and keep high-quality students, while not alienating students outside the honors program? What aspects of an honors program would tip the scales for students who would naturally be offered honors admission to other schools with established honors programs? Should we offer a self-developed gen ed program, guaranteed participation in URES during the early years, specialized IDIS courses, etc.? What role should Residence Life, Financial Aid, and/or Admissions play in an Honors Student experience?
February 1st, 2010 at 4:25 pm
For everybody’s information, a group of us is in the process of collecting some information about existing honors programs and will be presenting what we find at the next planning meeting.
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:18 am
I’m all for an honors program and for as ambitious a program as we can imagine. I’d begin my fact- finding by looking at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. The entire college is the program. Would it be possible to make Mary Washington into an “honors college”? How far from possible would it be to find, consistently, 900 plus students a year who would be intrigued by an honors curriculum and who would be capable of doing the work of an honors program?
February 5th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
I think that an Honors Program that offers more flexibility in regard to Gen Eds could be very attractive to an incoming first year student. Having designated sections of a course labeled honors would be an appealing section to teach. If such sections of a course were to exist, I’d like to be able to enroll non-honors students who have demonstrated superior performance in pre-requisite coursework.
February 7th, 2010 at 11:01 am
[...] broadly about ways to improve in our academic program. One of the questions being considered is the possibility of developing an Honors Program. I think we need to start by defining what we mean by an “Honors Program”. I think that [...]
February 9th, 2010 at 11:13 am
I like what Steve has to say on his blog. I like the idea of restricting the honors program to motivated students. Long term I’d love to have an honors college: no more 13th grade students from the get go, but that’s a dream. Following Steve, how about allowing students to apply after a year of classes here and with a GPA of 3.5 or better, staying in program requiring maintaining that GPA? How about an honors dorm and resident faculty? Several schools do that. Then what extra would honors students have to or get to do? Minimally they could participate in team-taught (year-long) seminars focusing on ideas and controversies in the disciplines as they relate to the real world. There could be a total of three or four such seminars –social sciences, humanities and arts, sciences and math. Honors students would have to take at least two–in sophomore and junior years, but could take more if space were available. Then all honors students would be required to do an honors thesis in major–again a yea long “course” in the senior year.
February 18th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I agree that development of a truly substantive honors program could be both an efficient and effective way to attract high quality students. As an institution, we continue to face instability. We do not yet have our university structure in place, we are challenged to satisfy our SACS reaccreditation mandates, and are dealing with ongoing fiscal hardship. Now seems to be the time to seek improvement by determining how to use the resources currently available to us in the best way possible. An honors program that offers tangible benefits for students could be a way to achieve substantial improvements at reasonable cost. In my opinion, we should focus our attention on exactly this type of “low-hanging fruit”.
February 19th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
I’d like to comment on the first 2 sentences of the prompt for this discussion. I think an honors program would be a significant improvement in our ability to draw in and retain higher quality students at UMW. Our lack of an honors program may actively repel students that are looking for clear challenges, but are also looking for some recognition of their talents and accomplishments. Here is an example that I can easily imagine happening to many students. When my daughter received her letter of acceptance to UMW she showed me the letter. I won’t quote the letter, but it in essence stated that my daughter was in the group of the most highly qualified applicants to UMW last year. Therefore, she was worthy of being an honors student. Yet, it was clear there was not special honors program in which she might participate, even though she was worthy of some kind of honor. If we have little financial incentive to offer these most qualified students, we need to offer them something else. That something else can be an honors program. Let’s look at some of our most direct competitors: JMU has an honors program, UVA has an honors program, Christopher Newport has an honors program. Can we afford to not have an honors program?
The second prompt was about alienation of non-honors students. While it seems clear that we would keep the possibility of alienating student in mind, this can not be a driving force in our decisions. I heard this reasoning many times while working for the federal government. “We should not design incentive programs for hard working people who excel at their job because we might make the average feel bad.” As a practical suggestion, could admission to an honors program include recruited students and walk-ons? Could we design a system that students could academically win the right to join, after they matriculate? That would be a method to put “honors” within the reach of some who did not earn entry initially.
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I agree that this is some “low hanging fruit” that we can and should take on. I do like the idea of students being grated honors admission (with the stipulation that they continue to meet certain GPA requirements). I also like the idea of an honors program that students could earn their way into after their first year. This also wouldn’t necessarily mean having these students do an entirely new set of classes. Many schools allow honors students to take “regular” courses if no honors sections are available or one doesn’t fit the rest of their schedule. These students can request to receive honors credit by completing additional work (usually extra reading and a research paper/project of some time). This is something we can do with the limited resources we have available and should be a priority.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:28 pm
I have strong reservations about honors programs. They create hierarchies among students. They create hierarchies among faculty members. Their existence implies that non-honors courses are intellectually inferior. They require administration, taking good teachers out of the classroom. They appeal to potential students’ egos, rather than to their passion for learning more about a particular area. They are often add-ons at larger schools intent on improving their rankings.
That said, I do see possibilities. Becoming the honors college of Virginia seems unrealistic, but we could create a truly distinctive honors program if we tried. One way to run an honors program is just to designate certain sections “honors.” A more interesting way is to think fresh, as Eric does when he suggests team-taught seminars that ask students to cross disciplines. Can we design a program or programs that ask students to think beyond traditional disciplinary divisions, offer options like team-taught courses and solo/group research, challenge students to connect their classroom learning to the real world, incorporate international experience and service learning and other opportunities, and more?
If we do, why should we call this “honors”? Why not call it by a particular name (maybe even a donor’s name) and group it under “special programs” along with first-year seminars and other programs yet to be created, some of which will require special admission and some of which will just require a passion for a particular area of study? “Honors” panders nicely to prospective students, but we can offer something much richer if we think beyond a single “honors” program covering all four years and restricted to those whose aptitude can be conventionally measured in high school. More exciting: multiple intellectually challenging interdisciplinary or special-interest programs targeting specific groups of students by year, by interest, by experience, or something else.
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I think we should start by simply providing some substance to our honors admission. If I understand our current system honors admission gets you an early acceptance and an invitation to Showcase. We can do better.
Jeff brought up the Echols Scholar program at UVA. I like it. Most of the benefits entail very little cost. This is the list from their website:
“Benefits of the Echols Scholars Program
■Exemption from area requirements in the College
■Priority registration times in selecting courses
■Option to declare Echols Interdisciplinary Major
■A shared first-year living experience
■A select cadre of faculty advisors
■Participation in the Echols news and information electronic network”
We would obviously have to scratch the interdisciplinary major thing because students can already do that at Mary Washington. We could consider using some of our luxury apartments in a first year living experience to attract top students. I believe the priority registration and exemption from distribution requirements are the things people like though.
If I understand it correctly the Echols Scholars program does not provide a separate set of honors classes the way some schools do. I would not be inclined to establish a whole set of distinct honors courses at Mary Washington for two reasons. First, it would require additional resources. Second, creating “a college within the college” would reduce many of the benefits of attracting high quality students. Our students should learn from each other, not just from us. They are not able to do this if we create barriers between them. So if this is what Marie means by hierarchies then I agree. On the other hand, I’m not opposed to giving students that we would really like to have here some rewards to come.
Finally, I think the issue of honors is distinct from the things that we should try to do to improve our programs and make the University more attractive to students generally.
April 5th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
I’ll reiterate my concerns about starting another committee here.
Line 94-95. “In addition to improving the first year experience”
Do we have any data yet to suggest that the first year experience is providing the outcomes that we desired from it? We’re diverting a large amount of faculty and classroom space to these small classes, are we getting enough bang for those bucks?
April 6th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
In reply to Janet’s last point: all but one of my first-year advisees, when asked to name their most significant intellectual experience so far this year, named something from a first-year seminar. (Anecdotal evidence, but interesting. Will the NSSE numbers support my sense that it’s made a real difference?))
April 8th, 2010 at 7:38 am
I am willing to support an honors program—assuming evidence exists that it would enhance our recruitment and retention of excellent students—but my support is contingent on the details. On the one hand, an honors college within CAS wherein honors students took all their classes together and were segregated from their non-honors peers would be detrimental to the educational experience of non-honors students and would make for a significantly less satisfying experience for the majority of faculty teaching non-honors classes. On the other hand, allowing honors students to take one honors-only class per year (in addition to perks like early registration) would be tolerable as it would have a minimal impact on the non-honors educational and teaching experience in CAS.