Honors and GPA above 3.5

JHS
Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:33:25 +0000

I can’t believe that’s right, Dipali. The departmental recommendation has got to be based primarily on how a student performed in her classes in the department, and on her honors thesis if there is one. It does not make sense that either department would punish a student that way for a decision made in the first quarter of her first year, before even declaring a major. If she takes 199, which is there so that people who didn’t take 160s can catch up, and she takes the other math the relevant department advises her to take, there’s no reason at all why she should be ineligible for departmental honors.

Two additional things:

First, your daughter should go to the Director of Undergraduate Studies in each department and ask. She’ll get a straight answer. It will either be what I said above, or what she thinks, but in either case she’ll know, and be able to take that into account. (Her academic adviser may also be able to give her an authoritative answer. By the way, where was her academic adviser when (a) she decided to take two difficult honors courses, and (b) she picked the one more relevant to her projected majors to drop out of? The academic advisers are there to help people avoid mistakes.)

Second, it’s not clear that departmental honors mean anything at all, to anybody. It’s a bunch of extra work, and lots of very good students decide not to bother with it. If they are trying to go into a PhD program, they really need to do the honors thesis and seminar, and honors more or less follow from that, but if they are going out into the world, or to professional school, no one cares. Something I definitely noticed during my hours of analyzing Convocation programs during my kids’ interminable graduations was that only around half of the Economics majors who were in Phi Beta Kappa (=~top 10% GPA) or were getting general honors (=~ top 60% GPA) were also getting departmental honors. The same also seemed true of Math. In the humanities and other social sciences, the overlap between PBK or general honors and departmental honors was close to 1:1.