This was accepted by the Faculty Senate,  March 31, 2003

TO: Faculty Senate

FROM: Faculty Senate Honors Committee
      Jay Mandt, Director, Honors

SUBJECT: Change in Departmental Honors Requirements

For many years, students have been able to earn Departmental Honors in their major field under regulations published in the Undergraduate Catalog (2001-02 edition, p. 28). This program is independent of the Honors Program, but administered through the Honors office.
In 1996, the Senate approved new Honors Program requirements that included a Senior Project designed to overlap the Departmental Honors requirements.

We propose: (1) modification of the requirements for Departmental Honors, and, (2) modification of Honors requirements to incorporate the new Departmental Honors requirements into them.

Current Requirements:
Departmental Honors: A student must complete an independent study project of 3-6 hours in their major. Proposed projects must be submitted for approval by a departmental committee, which later evaluates the work and awards Honors when merited. Eligibility: A 3.25 GPA.

Honors (Upper Division): A student must complete 6 hours of elective upper division Honors course work, and a Senior Project of 6 hours in their major. (A 3.25 GPA overall and in all Honors work is required for graduation.)

1. No students outside the Honors Program have availed themselves of the Departmental Honors opportunity for several years. At the same time, the existing requirement is very modest. Few institutions are prepared to award formal recognition to a student with a 3.25 GPA (the threshold for eligibility for departmental honors) upon completion of only a 3-hour independent study in their major. The present requirement plainly lacks departmental support, although all or nearly all departments either require or encourage outstanding majors to do senior projects or recitals, involve students in faculty research or support independent research, or encourage them to undertake other "capstone" projects. This informal system of capstone work for majors goes formally unrecognized by the University, while formal recognition, in the form of departmental honors, goes unclaimed. This disjunction should be rectified

2. Meanwhile, the 1996 version of Honors requirements has succeeded in promoting a great deal more Honors work at the freshman-sophomore level, but an upper division Honors curriculum has not emerged. Honors barely has the resources to offer a reasonable mix of seminars, let alone free-standing upper division courses. Departments also find this impossible. The result is that many students begin, but few complete Honors. Like the disjunction between what students do and what we recognize, this situation is untenable.

3. In the late 1990s, Honors made various attempts to promote upper division Honors course work in general education courses. Students were largely unresponsive. It is plain that the typical WSU student is very focused on his or her major at the upper division course level. For Honors, this points to the concept of Honors tracks in the majors.

4. The proposed requirements call for students to complete a "departmental honors track." We have in mind to allow departments considerable leeway in defining these tracks. They might include formal Honors courses offered by the department or college, e.g., Honors sections of the required upper division core courses in engineering. They might include traditional arrangements such as giving Honors credit for graduate courses taken by undergraduates, designating certain particularly demanding courses as the department’s Honors curriculum, requiring enhanced versions of senior requirements for Honors recognition, involving Honors candidates in research, etc. A departmental honors track should incorporate the course of study the department would advise any "honors" level major to pursue if he or she wished to excel. The essential thing is that a department’s honors track correspond to what the faculty would encourage its best students to do anyway. It should be "natural" for faculty to advise outstanding students to pursue departmental honors. By the same token, students who follow this advice and complete a 12-hour honors track in the major should be credited with completing upper division Honors requirements.

5. The recommended approach to Departmental Honors–and thus to upper division Honors requirements–will result in a great deal of variability in offerings from department to department. In part, this variability will simply reflect differences between how the various disciplines do things. But it is also likely that some departmental honors tracks will be more demanding academically than others. As a practical matter, this is unavoidable unless we create a core Honors curriculum for all students. But there is no interest at WSU in such an approach, and we lack both the resources to do it and a student body receptive to a non-major upper division curriculum. However, the purpose of Honors education is not to achieve uniformity, but to promote academic excellence. That every department’s honors track will not match what departments with the most resources and commitment will offer is no reason to define the program in terms of the least common denominator. Long term success is more likely if departments are encouraged to emulate the achievements of others, than if the pace of development is set by those who lag somewhat behind. To assure that basic standards are satisfied, departmental tracks should be subject to approval by the Senate Honors Committee.

6. Enhancing the Departmental Honors requirements also creates an academic opportunity for transfer students. The University will be able to market this opportunity as it recruits students in community colleges, or when students inquire about transferring from other four year institutions7. Outstanding students understand the value of real academic accomplishment and the value of having such accomplishment recognized. We believe that enhanced Departmental Honors requirements will lead to many more students pursuing this recognition and to a corresponding rise in the volume of first-rate academic work by members of our student body. This in turn will make more students competitive for admission to the best graduate and professional schools, bringing the University as whole greater recognition for the quality of its academic programs and its ability to prepare students for highly competitive futures.