What is an honors option?
Honors options allow Honors students the opportunity to work one-on-one with faculty members to plan and complete honors-level work within the context of a regular Mont Alto class. The honors option system is designed to allow any course to become an Honors course for the individual student who is completing the option. The Honors work is then recognized on the student’s transcript with an honors designation for that course.
Examples of honors options
- A research project on an area covered by the course.
- A video or multi-media project on a particular theme.
- A special experience designed to reinforce aspects of the course.
- A project to be submitted to the annual Academic Festival.
- A service-learning project.
- Use your imagination to create something new!
Honors Program students play Scrabble in the Honors Lounge
Guidelines
These guidelines are intended to help you develop and implement an interesting and worthwhile honors option. Please put serious thought into developing your project.
- Ideally, honors options are supervised by Honors program faculty. If that is not possible, other faculty may be approved to supervise on a case-by-case basis.
- The honors work should be a modification of, or an alternative to, some part of the course syllabus. Honors work should go more deeply into methodology, structure, and/or theory than regular work; it should attack more sophisticated questions and satisfy more rigorous standards than is generally expected in the same course without the honors option.
- A successful honors option experience will normally include planned regular meetings with the instructor for review, discussion, and revision as the project develops. Specific deadlines, identified clearly in the honors option proposal, can help with this.
- There should be a clear plan for how the honors work will be evaluated and how it will be integrated into the grade for the course.
If you or your instructors wish to discuss any aspect of the honors option, please contact the Honors Program coordinator.