Editor’s Note: Our thanks to the honors staff for providing this update:
The curriculum for University Honors has been revised, effective for students entering The University of Iowa Summer 2013 and after.
Students who complete the new University Honors requirements will have a notation on their transcript and diploma stating that they have graduated with University Honors. Indication of this award will be part of graduation ceremonies.
General Requirements
Students must opt into the program after being invited to do so.
First-year first-semester students must attend an Honors Program orientation session in the summer; other students must attend an informational session (e.g. Welcome to Honors) during a regular semester.
All students in their first semester of Honors Program membership must take at least one Honors course. First-year first-semester students must complete a 1 s.h. Honors First-Year Seminar during the fall semester. Other students may choose any offered Honors course or may develop an Honors Contract course.
Students must maintain a cumulative UI GPA of 3.33.
CURRICULUM
Level One Requirement: Building Knowledge
Students must complete a minimum of 12 s.h. of Honors course work by the end of the fourth semester of fulltime Honors Program membership.
A maximum of 3 s.h. of Honors Contract courses may be applied to the level one requirement except in the case of new members with significant General Education credit. These students may apply up to 6 s.h. of honors contract credit.
Level Two Requirement: Learning by Doing
Students must complete an additional 12 s.h. (or the equivalent) of Honors experiences.
Experiential learning for honors credit can take many forms, including research, study abroad, or internships; work completed for honors in the major, usually resulting in a thesis or creative project, also counts as experiential learning for honors credit.
Students choose from the options below, with some options completely satisfying the requirement and others requiring a combination of activities:
Honors in the major (as required by a department) completely satisfies the level two requirement.
Mentored research (practica, paid, or as a fellow with the Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates).
Study abroad with project.*
Internships with project* (may satisfy up to 6 s.h. of the level two requirement).
Honors and graduate level course work (may satisfy up to 6 s.h. of the level two requirement).
*Study abroad and internships require a pre-approved, independent project with a poster presentation or paper facilitated by Honors.
(*Engineering students have alternative requirements; please visit the Honors Program web page for information.)
For questions on the new curriculum and requirements, contact Holly Yoder at honors-advisor@uiowa.edu.
We are long overdue in writing a profile of the Temple University Honors College in Philadelphia, but what from what we have learned, we can say it is well worth writing about and considering as an honors option.
The college falls into our largest category, which includes programs with average SAT’s in the 1300’s. The actual average score at Temple Honors College is 1334. The college admits about 350 freshmen each year and has a total enrollment of 1,592, including some transfer students and non-freshman entrants.
As we have written in several profiles and in our book, we continue to believe that the quality and extent of the honors curriculum is the most important attribute of a program, not least because it provides a continuing focal point for honors contacts among students and faculty.
The Temple honors curriculum requires 10 honors courses and establishes yearly benchmarks that students must reach in order to avoid probation. We believe this is an excellent policy, as it ensures the continuing involvement that sets the best honors programs apart from those that see students losing interest after the first year or two.
At the end of the freshman year, honors students must have completed at least three honors courses. As sophomores, they must have completed six honors courses. After their junior year, they must have at least eight honors courses under their belts and be able to work on honors projects, theses, and additional courses in the final year.
The other outstanding feature of the college is its living/learning community for honors students, the “1300” residence hall on the south side of campus. The 1300 includes about 90 percent of freshman honors students, a very high percentage and one that likely contributes strongly to honors retention rates.
The 1300 is also outstanding because it houses more than 1,000 total honors students, including upperclassmen in apartment-type accommodations. The other rooms are suites, and all are air-conditioned. Many honors residence halls cannot house students across all four years, and most of those that do cannot match the amenities of 1300.
So along with Penn State Schreyer, Delaware, UMass Amherst, Pitt, and UConn honors, students in the northeast have another solid public option for honors education.
Apply as soon after January 1 as possible to be considered for the best scholarships, which are awarded by February 15. The final application deadline for the university is March 1.
Note: this excellent piece by Max Janerka, is from the Oklahoma Daily. A great story about an honors dean collaborating with a student…
Starting this coming semester, OU will be offering an experimental program of MOOCs, or Massively Open Online Courses.
This pilot program will be made available exclusively through the Honors College at first, and it will not count for OU credit, said Jake Morgan, a microbiology sophomore and the mastermind behind the program.
Morgan, who also is a reporter for The Daily, said the pilot program will begin a few weeks into the semester and function like the Honors College reading groups, where students involved in the online courses meet in informal groups once a week to discuss what they learned and study together.
This would make up for the lack of community sentiment that is regarded as the greatest pitfall of MOOCs as a whole, Morgan said, and it will allow students to work together in pursuit of knowledge.
Morgan said he got the idea when he attended an educational symposium called “NextEd” at the Oklahoma Creativity Festival. One of the speakers there was Ken Parker, founder of NextThought, which is an innovative start-up focused on improving the quality and accessibility of online education, according to Creative Oklahoma’s website.
At the festival, Parker talked about online education and discussed MOOCs and the dangers and pitfalls of studying online and relying on the Internet, Morgan said. The question that bothered Morgan was how to create a learning community while still being involved in the MOOC, so he decided to try to resolve the biggest problem of a lack of interaction here at OU.
After coordinating with Honors College Dean David Ray, Morgan came up with a plan.
The program will encompass four online courses over three platforms: Game Theory and Critical Thinking in Global Challenges from Coursera, How to Build a Startup from Udacity and a course on artificial intelligence from edX. Morgan said it was important for the pilot program to be spread over multiple platforms and different types of programs in order to have a wider base from which to build the MOOC program in the future.
The artificial intelligence course is, according to edX’s website, an upper-division course originating from UC Berkley that is taught by Pieter Abbeel and Dan Klein and introduces the basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems.
How to Build a Startup is a business course focusing on instructor Steve Blank’s Customer Development process, according to Udacity’s website. The key steps of this process include identifying and engaging the first customers for a product and gathering, evaluating and using customer feedback to improve the product, marketing and business model.
Game Theory from Coursera is taught by Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham of Stanford University and Kevin Leyton-Brown of the University of British Columbia and focuses on “representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more,” according to the website.
The Coursera website also describes the course Critical Thinking in Global Challenges as one which will help students to “develop and enhance [their] ability to think critically, assess information and develop reasoned arguments in the context of the global challenges facing society today.” This course is taught by Mayank Dutia and Celine Caquineau, both of the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.
Morgan said the program is still in its planning stages. Meeting times, resources and student involvement are all still being worked on.
“We are planning on starting small,” Morgan said. “That way, if there is a problem, whether in the program or in logistics, we will be able to tackle it.”
Although this new program is not limited to honors students, we thought it would be of interest. The excellent piece about the program by the campus editor follows.
By Allison McGillivray, Campus Editor, The Miami Student
Miami University Senate approved the creation of a pre-medicine co-major at its meeting Monday Nov.19. The major will allow students who plan to apply to medical school to major in pre-medicine in addition to their chosen major.
The new co-major will require students to take all courses that are required by medical schools and that will be covered on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), which recently added to the material that test-takers are required to know, according to Dave Pennock, professor of zoology.
In addition, pre-medicine co-majors must take a course in their first-year where they plan their studies at Miami. Students must also take a medical school application preparation class in their third year.
The Senate’s approval of the major makes Miami the first school in Ohio to have a pre-medicine co-major, according to Pennock.
Senator and Professor of political science Philip Russo said the co-major should be approved since it institutionalizes a program that Miami already has and will make a difference in recruiting pre-medicine students.
“You can bet that there are several university senates around the state discussing this right now, given the political economy for competing for these types of students in the state of Ohio, there will be several coming down the pike,” Russo said. “So we might as well get out in front on this and institutionalize what we already have.”
Editor’s Note: The Miami Student is the oldest campus newspaper in the U.S., having been established in 1826.
It is a dream of many honors deans and directors that their offices might one day be able to coordinate honors curriculum, undergraduate research, internships, and study-abroad under one roof.
That day has already arrived for the Honors College at East Tennessee State University, located in Johnson City, right on the border between Tennessee and Virginia.
Although the bedrock University Honors Scholars program was established in 1993, the advent of the Honors College in 2005 brought with it two more honors options along with the consolidation of all the above functions within the college. Dean Rebecca Ann Pyles reports that graduation rates are high among the more than 400 students enrolled in all honors options–86–88 percent of students graduate in honors.
The University Honors Scholars program enrolls only about 22 students a year. Minimum entrancement requirements include an SAT of 1290 and GPA of 3.5. The UHS program extends across all four years and, like the other two options at the college, requires the completion of an honors thesis.
UHS students complete four year-long seminars, two in the freshmen year and two more as sophomores. The freshman seminars focus on English and philosophy. Students consider alternatives to their own views, often from global perspectives, and then reflect on how their own perspectives might be seen by others.
In the sophomore year, much of the emphasis is on the interrelationships of the sciences and the broader culture. Students not only learn about the most significant scientific concepts but also the ethical responsibilities that accompany many scientific advances.
Sophomores also take a turn toward the creative side. Students study and participate in studio and performing arts, learning the importance of aesthetics to all elements of human culture.
Juniors participate in the unique Honors Appalachian course, where they study the history, arts, economics, and politics of the region.
Senior honors work focuses on research and the completion of the honors thesis.
The Midway Scholars option enrolls transfer students with an associate’s degree or at least 30 hours of credit, and with a minimum GPA of 3.5. Midway Scholars take three honors or honors option courses and must complete a research course and write a thesis.
The Honors in Discipline (HID) option also requires honors or honors option coursework along with a thesis in the major, or “discipline,” of the student. Currently, seventeen departments are involved in the HID program.
All honors students can take advantage of Washington internships coordinated by the honors office, and can participate in international study, also through the honors college.
Honors students at ETSU also have the option of living on the sixth floor of Governors Hall, new in 2007. The hall includes space for more than 500 students who share double rooms with private baths.
Taking inspiration from the prominent role of Boston in the America Revolution, faculty from the University of Maine who made presentations at the National Collegiate Honors Council annual conference in Boston sought to define what makes honors education “revolutionary” in contrast to many college courses that have a more instrumental focus.
One answer: the revolution occurs within bright students who are seriously evaluating their beliefs in light of great texts and new experiences, and who share their thoughts, concerns, and criticisms with faculty and with other students who are going through the same process.
Most of what they discuss is the result of a process one professor referred to as “thinking hard about things that matter.” Ironically, classes that explore and challenge religious beliefs or explore humanity’s relationship with nature or reflect on previous cultural and political revolutions are often dismissed by those who believe that instrumental, or vocational, learning is the thing that matters.
What, more specifically, can honors learning mean for a student. One young woman in the Maine honors college said that she had come to the university as a “diehard relativist” who was convinced that there was no such thing as objective truth. Now at the end of her honors career—but not her intellectual commitment—her vocational interests may not have changed, but her basic attitude toward the world—her values—have been dramatically affected; she has discovered, if not absolute truth, then true conviction. To what extent would this have occurred in a business management class, or a calculus class?
Is this a risk, not only to students, but to parents who send their young men and women to college? Yes, but honors education embraces an element of risk, subscribing to the idea that young people grow by putting themselves “out there” in the company of peers who are part of the same process of internal and mutual discovery.
Successful honors instructors, therefore, have to extend themselves, to join in the effort to “push the envelope beyond the instrumental.”
One Maine economics professor took on the challenge of teaching an honors course on how we define nature, in the process leaving the “dismal science” behind him along with some of his accustomed hard logic. Before he was done, he and his class had followed Thoreau’s path in the Maine woods, subjected themselves to an orienteering challenge, and emerged from both the literal and figurative forest of humanity’s relationship with nature filled with new questions, new insights, and deeper understanding.
A professor who taught a course about the Sixties’ revolution found that his students experienced the hope and optimism of “the movement,” saw its impact (especially on white Americans), recognized the “I have a dream” speech of Martin Luther King as one of the most eloquent expressions of the times—but then had to come to terms with the disillusionment that followed that particular revolution.
What does this teach students who are thinking hard about things that matter? They may come to believe that each generation needs to dream its own dreams, let them emerge, learn from them, and accept a due portion of disappointment themselves. It may not be calculus, but it really matters.
Dr. Lynne Goodstein has a wealth of experience in honors education, having directed the program at the University of Connecticut for many years. The UConn program has more than 1,600 students, and about half of them live in honors residence halls; another quarter live elsewhere on campus.
Even though Dr. Goodstein is leaving honors to return to the classroom, she shared her insights into developing effective, high-impact programs for honors residences and facilities during a session at the National College Honors Council annual conference in Boston.
Below please see her “top ten” recommendations. Parents and prospective students should find these useful as they visit honors colleges and programs across the country.
The programming for residence halls should have clear goals and learning objectives.
Variety is extremely important; the “menu” should include community service, along with social, academic, and professional development and opportunities to meet with faculty.
The programs should be tailored to match the changing needs of students across four years. This means offering a wide variety of activities in the first two years, including many social programs to develop a sense of community. During the last two years, programming becomes more closely-related to specific professional and academic interests.
Programming benefits from partnerships with cultural centers on and off campus, with academic departments, and with the university office of residential life.
Residential assistants (RA’s) should be well-trained and understand the connections between their programs and honors goals.
Incentives to students are important, but should not be excessive. Students should not be required to attend too many programs—about five in the first two years is recommended.
Honors staff need to focus on online and other means of communicating meeting the topics, dates, and times of program events..
Honors staff should solicit and read student response forms for use in future planning.
At UConn, one of the most successful programs is the “Lunch Bunch,” a series of luncheon meetings during which honors students have informal discussions with faculty, whom they get to know on a more personal basis.
The Honors in the Arts programming allows students to develop or expand an interest in the arts and meet new people in small groups. Book clubs are another way to expand student interest and promote positive associations.
Leadership programs and alumni presentations tailored to specific majors and professions are also
successful and help to sustain ties between generations of students.
The theme of the 2012 conference of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) being held in Boston is “challenging structures” in higher education, and at the center of that challenge is the honors focus on the “ecology” of undergraduate instruction: the critical and sometimes difficult balance among faculty, students, and the pursuit of knowledge that brings them together.
In a session devoted to honors instruction, a thoughtful and expressive panel of honors professionals emphasized that learning at the highest level requires challenging themselves and their students to see the acquisition of knowledge as a dynamic, adventurous process that goes far beyond the ingestion of basic facts.
The goal, according to Michael Doran, director of the honors program at the University of South Alabama, is to work with students so that they can gain confidence, accept risks, and become passionate about “inquiry and the creation of new knowledge…students rise to higher expectations, and that message is transferred to other students on campus.”
The words “creativity” and “reflection” and “inquiry” were prominent in the discussion. John Zubizarreta of Columbia College in South Carolina noted that the “importance of reflection…is important for all students, but for honors students it’s indispensable.”
One reason: honors portfolios, when they are in fact used in honors programs, collect the most important elements of a student’s experience–major papers, significant projects, notes, lists of books and their significance–all of which connect the student to accomplishments and aspirations, and clarify goals.
At Texas A&M, according to Jon Kolinek, associate director of the honors program, students in living/learning communities meet to discuss what they have learned, especially in first-year courses and experiences, and then reflect on how the first year has reinforced their initial goals or caused them to consider different options.
The use of portfolios, discussions, and focused reflection is not unique to students. At Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, a formal mentoring program involving current honors faculty with prospective honors instructors has been in place for several years.
According to Jacquie Scott, director of the Barrett Faculty Mentoring Program for Teaching Excellence and an honors faculty fellow at Barrett, the program requires two years of classroom visits and feedback, all geared toward making Barrett faculty as focused as they can be on effective, high-level student instruction. The program has also increased overall faculty cooperation and reduced territorial conflicts among disciplines. This is yet another way that honors education can be a positive influence for the university as a whole.
One part of the honors “ecology” that is requiring more attention is the recognition that the traditional honors predilection toward confident, extroverted young scholars who can comfortably participate in what are typically small honors seminars can mean that quieter, introverted students of great ability might be overlooked or misunderstood if they do participate in honors. An audience member from the University of Southern Maine pointed out that faculty need to be aware of such students and not equate their relative reticence with a lack of ability or the passion for learning
Jon Kotinek of Texas A&M sees honors instruction is a process of “layering” honors experiences in the most effective manner. This layering, the ecology of honors instruction, means that the watchwords of creativity, inquiry, reflection, and even risk should inform the pedagogy of faculty and the attitudes of students, to the end that the knowledge they all seek is not merely transmitted but also transformed by their exciting work.
Florida, in the news once again for its election woes, is also joining Texas and Virginia in the race to see how much havoc meddling university board members can create in the name of “reform.”
In Florida, the most controversial issue is “differentiated tuition,” a business-speak term to describe a plan to reduce tuition for STEM majors and others in Legislature-designated priority fields, while allowing tuition for students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to increase.
(See discussion and links related to Differentiated Tuition, below.)
Florida Governor Rick Scott has expressed his admiration for the conservative push by Rick Perry in Texas to transform that state’s flagship schools into productivity machines aligned with the perceived economic needs of the state and business community. Like the recent fiasco in Virginia, these efforts stem, so to speak, from the brains of libertarian and entrepreneurial types who are all agog over the latest management trends. What they claim as their goal is “value” for the state and, occasionally, for students; what they desire is instrumental education on the cheap, paid for in part by gutting those pesky academic disciplines that examine values beyond the bottom line.
Florida Higher Ed Task Force Plan is not only poorly written in its current draft form but also ill-advised. It also has a confrontational, we-know-best tone, especially in its references to “academics.”
“A chasm…exists between the system’s colleges and universities and those who must make the difficult decisions in appropriating scare resources,” the plan says. “Many in the academy deny or outright reject the expectations for increased efficiencies and productivity as precursors to demonstrating value that is presumed, to the detriment of the institutions and systems, as self-evident.”
Despite the inelegance of the last sentence, it is more or less clear that the task force is upset with the academy. Furthermore, the task force wants the academy to know that the state’s Board of Governors does indeed have the final word in higher education: The Board is authorized “to operate, regulate, control, and be fully responsive for the management of the whole university system.”
The plan even slips in a criticism of health care as being one of the villains in causing college costs to rise, along with “the perceived demands by students for making ‘college a life-style, not just people getting an education.’” And the state of North Carolina also receives a gratuitous slap as an allegedly spendthrift state “widely held as a paragon for [sic] higher education systems” yet “it leads Florida by only two percentage points in…the proportion of its citizens who hold associate degrees or higher.”
The lifestyle quote also appeared in a New York Times story that correctly pointed out that support jobs in all colleges, public and private, have been growing. But not all of that growth is directed at pampering students.
“The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers,” the Times reported. “The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations and reporting requirements colleges face.” And not a few of those requirements have to do with documenting the metric-driven results dictated by governors and legislatures.
Differentiated Tuition
But what about the merits of differentiated tuition? The task force wants to lower tuition for “high-wage, high-demand (market determined demand) degree programs, as identified by the Legislature.” This phrase appears repeatedly, verbatim, throughout the draft report. The success of the plan will be measured by the following:
1. More degrees in “strategic areas of importance”;
2. Higher percentage of grads who become employed or who continue their education;
3. More grads who attain employment at a higher salary rate; and
4. More “efficiencies” that lower the cost for institutions and students.
The draft somewhat vaguely identifies the “important” degree programs: 111 in STEM subjects; 28 in Globalization (whatever that may be); 21 in health professions; 19 in education (but only in Math and Sciences); and 9 in security and emergency services.
“First, you need to take it on faith that the government is capable of divining which majors are going to be the most marketable year after year,” Weissmann writes. “Second, you need to believe that there are a large number of talented undergrads who could hack it in these subjects, but are choosing easier majors instead.”
“Meanwhile,” Weissmann adds, “it’s not clear that hoards of potential engineers and computer scientists are shunning the campus lab in order to go read Baudelaire instead. Though I haven’t seen state-level data, the vast majority of bachelor’s degrees awarded in this country go to students who study business, science, engineering, and health. The kids today already approach college with a fairly pre-professional mindset.”
Berman notes that “there’s no reason to think this would help Florida economically. If the state wants to align higher education with the needs of business, it should take a look at surveys of employers, who indicate, year after year, that what they most want from college grads is “the ability to effectively communicate” and “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills”—classic hallmarks of a liberal arts education. And studies like Academically Adrift show that it’s the humanities and social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, that lead to measurable improvements in critical thinking.”
The Washington Post article cites Hunter Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities and the former president of both Cornell and the University of Iowa, as believing that the humanities and arts actually help contribute to alleviating our national STEM teacher and research crisis.
“Whereas a high percentage of students who come to college wanting to major in science and engineering drop out and go into business-related social sciences, this is not nearly so much the case at liberal arts colleges,” the Post says.
According to the Post, in the “nation’s most selective liberal arts colleges, a higher percentage of students go on to graduate and professional degrees in STEM fields than is the case at the nation’s major research universities. Integrated liberal arts knowledge, where STEM is a vital component of a larger curriculum that includes a range of literacies, creative expression, and the arts, seems to be ideal for developing future STEM teachers, practitioners, and researchers.”
The same can be said of honors colleges and programs in larger institutions, where the curriculum and “lifestyle” reflect the best in liberal arts education. Honors education does not imitate a factory operation designed to meet an instrumental, external demand but instead embraces the words of a renowned Greek philosopher, whose own method has become a model of effective pedagogy: “Education is the kindling of a flame,” Socrates said,” not the filling of a vessel.”
Students in the honors program at Texas A&M University now have to meet a new set of requirements to remain in the program, and now all freshman honors students are assigned to the honors learning community.
But the program also offers more flexibility now, allowing students to contract for honors credit in a broader range of classes.
TAMU honors housing received a high evaluation in our recent book, A Review of Fifty Public University Honors Programs. So it’s not a burden for all freshmen to live in the honors community. They begin their freshman year there, and now, with a separate honors application in place, they can receive better advising and more readily get the classes they need through the priority registration available to them.
“The transition from high school to college has been pleasant because of all of the people I met in the program [who] help me with whatever I need. It’s a nice sense of family that we have going on here. I have a lot of friends who are having a hard time adjusting to college because they feel very alone, but I haven’t faced that problem because of the Honors functions and living with the people in my classes,” said Deanna Sessions, freshman electrical engineering major.
In addition to the housing change, students must now meet the following minimum continuation requirements:
Maintain a 3.5 cumulative GPR and a 3.25 in Honors course work
Make progress toward distinction requirements by taking at least 6 hours of Honors course work each academic year
Participate in the HFLC (freshmen) or at least one HSC event per semester (continuing students)
Update an e-Portfolio and meeting with an advisor at least once per year
Plan and execute a capstone experience in their junior or senior year that synthesizes and integrates their educational experiences in the form of a research or scholarly project
Please note that the 6-hour credit requirement per year is a minimum to remain in good standing, while the actual completion requirement to graduate as an honors fellow is at least 27 hours of coursework and and 3-hour capstone project. Honors students may of course also earn Latin honors, requiring at least a cumulative university-wide GPA of 3.5 for cum laude status.
The minimum requirements to apply to the program remain the same: at least a 1250 SAT, with both verbal and math scores of at least 570.
