Honors Courses

Honors courses bring together outstanding students and faculty in an environment designed to encourage initiative, creativity, and independent thinking. Honors students have the opportunity to work closely with leading professors and to receive individual attention and special services typical of small private schools. At the same time, students enjoy the resources of one of the nation’s premier research universities, including state-of-the-art laboratory, library, and computing facilities.

Honors courses are small — usually no more than 20 seats — and are lead by faculty that have been identified by their departments as outstanding teachers.  Honors courses encourage students to delve deeply into the course material, not just to master the material, but to learn how to think. 

Students who choose to challenge themselves can also take a combination of courses that will allow them to graduate with an Honors graduation distinction, either at the University level, college level, or departmental level. 

Honors courses are intended to be “enriched,” not accelerated.  Although the content of an Honors course will be largely the same as a non-honors course, the class activities will require a student to interact differently and at a deeper level than in a non-honors course.  For instance, one could expect increased discussion, critical essays, creative projects, and group presentations instead of rote memorization or multiple-choice tests.  Overall, students prefer their Honors courses over their non-honors courses, although they do admit that the Honors courses can be more time-consuming.