Academic Enrichment Honors Courses & Options

Honors courses are a central component of the academic experience offered at the Schreyer Honors College. To serve our diverse and engaged student body, more than 300 of these honors courses are offered across a variety of subjects. In cases where an honors course is not available, Scholars have the option to inquire about an honors option.

Scholars working with faculty on an honors course project

Honors Courses

Honors courses should have specific enrichment goals beyond the regular version of the course. If there is no regular version, especially in the case of “special topics” courses, the baseline for building on enrichment goals should be non-honors courses at that level in the department.

Schreyer Honors College Faculty Advisory Committee's statement on honors courses:

Honors courses engage students deeply, creatively, and ethically with the complexities of a scholarly subject. Honors courses challenge students to examine underlying frameworks, evaluate details of a subject, synthesize those details, and create, develop, or construct an advanced perspective. The content and assessment methods of honors courses provide enhanced opportunities for independent and innovative thinking.

This statement reserves to the instructor all decisions about how this engagement with complexity should happen, but we recognize that many instructors are open to additional guidance.

Suggestions for Design or Refinement of the Honors Course Syllabus

Relate Honors Enrichment to the Honors College Mission

If our mission is to have real relevance, it should be expressed in signature aspects of the honors experience such as honors courses. Because the official statement of our mission is very general, we have reformulated it (while also considering our vision and values statements) in more specific terms based on the work of several faculty committees. Any honors course that engages with one or more of the four themes (Scholarship, Ethics, Global Interdependency/Respect for Human Differences, and Collaboration and Leadership) meets our expectations for enrichment. Note that the “Academic Excellence with Integrity” aspect of our mission has been elaborated under “Scholarship” to highlight the importance of scholarly communication, which is a reliable emphasis for most honors courses.

Consult with Departmental Honors Advisers

Especially for faculty who do not have much prior experience with Schreyer Scholars, the department honors adviser (some majors have more than one — see the honors advisor listing here) can tell you what honors students expect from honors courses in your major. They may also be familiar with past honors course offerings.

Don't Sell Regular Courses Short

Over the past few decades Penn State and other large universities have significantly improved large-group instruction. It's no longer enough simply to reference the smaller class size of honors courses, or their focus on discussion, as guarantees of worthwhile enrichment. It is important to specify the nature of the enrichment in the syllabus, so students understand what to expect.

Honors Options

Most Schreyer Scholars will take one or more honors options during their time at Penn State, and instructors of a regular (non-honors) course may be asked by a student to offer this enrichment opportunity. The decision to offer (supervise) an honors option is always yours as the instructor. Here is some important information to help you make that decision, and to guarantee a worthwhile enrichment experience if you agree.

Please contact SHCAcademics@psu.edu with any questions related to honors options.

Like most honors programs and colleges nationally, Penn State does not have enough honors courses across the curriculum (especially in the upper division) for students to meet their honors credit requirements solely with honors courses and the eventual honors thesis. A successful honors option should give the student a significantly enriched experience for part of the course, sufficient to justify an honors transcript notation and satisfaction of requirements.

There are many worthwhile forms of enrichment, and several possibilities are suggested in our discussion of honors courses above. We specifically don't want honors options to “pile on” the same sort of work, e.g. longer problem sets or essays but with the same content or prompt.

In the past we also insisted that honors options should remove some part of the syllabus-prescribed graded work in order to add a corresponding amount of enriched work. While the preferred honors option model removes some part of the syllabus-prescribed graded work in order to add a corresponding amount of enriched work, we also permit enriched work to be additional rather than substituted for regular work. However, in all cases without exception (a) the enriched work must count for between 10 and 25% of the course grade, and (b) the total grading rubric must equal 100%. In other words, if the enriched work is additional, the other work must be pro-rated down to 75 to 90% of the course grade according to the percentage assigned to the enriched work.

All courses are nominally eligible for the honors option, however, in practice some courses are not a good fit such as lower-level world language, math or science below Penn State's standard first-semester placement, etc. While there is no policy against honors options in courses where an actual honors version is available at the campus, it's probably a good idea to decline those requests unless there are special circumstances.

While it is legitimate for a student to propose an honors option in something outside their major, whether general education or purely elective, you are certainly entitled to inquire about their genuine interest in enrichment in the course. There is always some element of necessity (fulfillment of requirements) in student requests for honors options, but some genuine degree of enrichment interest is necessary to justify your extra work as an instructor.

The only instructors who may not offer honors options by college policy are graduate students and adjuncts — this is to protect them from exploitation as people who are paid by the course (and who, in the case of grad students, are primarily here for something else.) We will consider exceptions to the rule for adjuncts if they have the support of their department, as expressed by the lead honors adviser to the Schreyer Honors College associate dean for academic affairs. Teaching faculty may offer honors options on the same basis as tenure-line faculty, unless their department specifies otherwise. If you are teaching faculty, please make sure the proposed honors option is consistent with your time and resource constraints — for instance, the student shouldn't propose to do work in your lab if you don't have one!

Students must propose the honors option via the college's Student Records System, but they shouldn't submit that before discussion with the faculty member. Once submitted—which should be by the end of the third week of the semester—the instructor will receive an automated email prompt to review the proposal. You may approve it, return it for revisions, or reject it, but that last option should only be if the student submitted without consultation with you, or if they submitted against your wishes. Once approved, whether initially or after revisions, the proposal goes to the student's honors adviser for review; while this is usually pro-forma, the honors adviser is our agent and is expected to return proposals for revision by the student if they don't meet the standards described here, or if they lack sufficient detail. Our office also does a cursory review of all proposals to make sure they have sufficient detail, since the honors option is a contract for specific work.

The proposal should be clear about the expected work product and when it's due — which should be no later than the last day of classes for the semester. Assuming the work is completed satisfactorily, you enter the course grade in the usual way in LionPath (taking into account the percentage assigned to the enriched work in the proposal, and our overall policies above). There will be no special notation in LionPath that the student is doing an honors option, so it's up to you to remember although our office will send a reminder late in the semester.

Students sometimes want to cancel (rescind) an honors option, and they can do so by doing a petition in our Student Records System prior to the last day of classes. While they don't need your permission as the instructor to do that, they should certainly consult with you first. This is especially true if they proposed substitute work, since if the enriched work isn't completed, they will need your approval to revert to the usual work.

Enriched work done poorly (or even not at all) impacts that percentage of the course grade assigned to it (from 10 to 25%), but the course will still get the honors notation. A student might therefore drop from A to B for the course, get the honors notation, while totally failing to complete the enriched work. While this is rare, we encourage you to build incremental deadlines into the proposal, or to have the enriched work due early enough that any deficiencies can be addressed.

Schreyer Scholar Hannah Lombardo

With their small size and engaging professors, the hallmark feature of honors classes is being able to facilitate the deeper and more meaningful learning of course material in an intimate setting. Having that personal feedback in an environment that promotes asking questions has been very formative in my education.

Hannah Lombardo ' 20 Science BS/MBA