Honors Drop Irks Seniors

With the College planning to award honors to a third fewer graduates this June, seniors may have to adjust to having one fewer title for their resumes.

Some seniors say they are frustrated that they are the first to feel the squeeze and say they wish they had been notified of the changes earlier.

“What is problematic is that the current junior and senior classes applied to these concentrations under the assumption that they would not be subjected to a quota system to determine their distinction, that they would graduate with the honors merited by their thesis and grades,” Megan G. Cameron ’05, a social studies concentrator, writes in an e-mail.

“I don’t disagree fundamentally with the policy; it’s simply frustrating to think that if I had only come to Harvard a year earlier and written the exact same thesis I plan on writing now, there’s a chance that my diploma might have been a bit more impressive.”

This fall, the College released a brochure detailing the changes, which cap at 60 percent the number of members of the Class of 2005 who will receive honors. The change follows a Faculty vote two years ago to reign in the number of honors graduates, which exceeded 90 percent of the class in 2004.

Under the new system, departments will continue to recommend honors candidates, who will be subject to much stricter College-wide GPA cutoffs.

While Faculty members say the new policy is appropriate, and many students agree that honors inflation existed, both sides say it will take time for students to adjust their expectations.

“Many of our seniors are upset by the new system, in part because they realize that they would not have been subjected to it if they had been born a year earlier,” Anya Bernstein, director of undergraduate studies for social studies, writes in an e-mail. “[While] I personally support the change in honors, as I think honors do not mean as much when more than 90 percent of the students receive them, I do...feel for this group of students.”

MAKING THE CUTOFF

Under the new honors system, students will still receive English honors for work completed in their concentrations, but a third fewer students will receive the Latin honors that recognize overall academic performance.

Around five percent of the members of the graduating class who have been recommended for highest honors in their concentrations will receive summa cum laude degrees, the same cap from previous years. Students whose concentration recommends them for high honors will be awarded magna cum laude degrees, bringing the total number of summa and magna degrees to no more than 20 percent.

Another 30 percent of seniors who have been recommended for concentration honors will graduate cum laude.

No more than 10 percent of students with high GPAs who are not recommended by their concentration for honors may also receive cum laude degrees.

Departments’ standards for recommending students for honors vary widely.

History sets the minimum GPA requirement for summa around 3.8 and for magna around 3.5. In psychology, only students who have A or A- GPAs and write magna or summa theses can earn highest honors.

But many departments have warned their students that they think the College might not accept up to half of their recommendations. History told its students that roughly half of their concentrators recommended last May for magna would have received the degree cum laude under the new regulations, and half those recommended for cum laude would have received no honors at all.

Bernstein also says that social studies expects only two-thirds of its students to receive the recommended level of honors.

A student’s transcript will include the department’s recommendation as well as the honors the College awards.

Students say they wish the College did not have to rely on percentage cutoffs to award Latin honors.

“I despise percentage rankings. We should be rewarding people for what they’re doing, not punishing them,” says Harrison L. Jackson ’05, a history and literature concentrator.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

The stricter rules, as well as confusion over their precise effects, have led a few students to decide not to go through the thesis writing process.

While some seniors decide to drop their theses every year, some say the honors transition was a significant factor in their decision this year.

“I was planning on writing a thesis when I came back in the fall, but was unsure because of different stories I had heard about the honors changes,” says one senior government concentrator.

The senior, who wished to remain anonymous to avoid being penalized for criticizing her department, says she chose not to write a thesis because writing one would not guarantee her honors.

“I didn’t want to venture into that possibility of engaging in this full-year-long project without knowing what was going to happen,” she says. “As a student here who’s about to graduate, I feel like I’m owed at least some type of consistent explanation of how my work is going to be evaluated.”

Head tutors in psychology and biology say they have not noticed a decrease in the number of students writing theses as a result of the change in requirements. But Pierce Professor of Psychology and Head Tutor in Psychology Ken Nakayama says it may be too early to tell.

“I suspect that this will happen with the new college rules,” he says.

And while students say they are still confused by the rules, head tutors for several concentrations say that they have kept students informed of the changes in honors policies.

Nakayama says that the department is in the process of explaining the new honors rules to concentrators. And Bernstein says she has already done the same at meetings for thesis students.

...THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME

Bernstein says it is impossible to predict what will happen to individual students under the new system.

“We are not doing anything differently this year, and expect, based on past experience, to continue to recommend the vast majority of our students for honors,” Bernstein writes, adding that the College has almost always accepted social studies’ recommendations in the past, occasionally giving a student a lower level of honors than that recommended by the concentration based on overall cutoff levels for the College.

“Because social studies students tend to be slightly stronger than Harvard students as a whole, we expect more than two-thirds of our students to receive Latin honors under the new system,” she says.

Nor do concentrations expect their students to have trouble earning admission to graduate and professional schools, even if fewer of the students applying have received honors.

Nakayama says that students who have chosen not to write theses and have not received honors in the past have still had a great deal of success in applying to graduate programs.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.