<p>You’ve just described the Swarthmore Honors program, the thing that really put Swarthmore on the map academically.</p>
<p>It was started in the 1920’s by Pres. Frank Adylotte, who came to Swarthmore with the express purpose of starting the Honors program. The basis of the Honors program was students doing independent non-classroom study either individually, or in small groups of two or three kids, with two professors in the department. Over the course of the final two years in school, an honors student would do honors “preparations” in three specific topics in his or her major, with Senior year largely devoted to a thesis on one of these topics. There were no grades at all in the Honors program until 1996.</p>
<p>At the end of four years, a outside panel of three experts in the field (typically professors from other fancy-pants schools) visits campus, reviews the honors students’ thesis and gives a series of written and oral exams on the three areas of study. This outside panel of examiners determines whether the student graduates with “honors”, “honors with distinction”, or “honors with high distinction”.</p>
<p>The program has changed somewhat over the years, but is still the same basic format. These days, you only prepare two honors topics, I think – kids were avoiding honors because it really cut down options for studying outside their major. And, now, honors students do receive grades in their regular classes, plus the various levels of honors are translated to grades on the final transcript based on some formula. If I recall, I think I read that last fall 130 outside experts arrived at Swarthmore to hear honors presentations and give the written and oral exams.</p>
<p>If you have the Swat admissions video, take a look at the scene where Emilano (the viola playing Rugby guy) is sitting in his professor’s office. That is a one-person class, developed for/by the kid on a subject that is not in the standard course catalog. That sort of thing is not unusual at all. This kind of course is listed in the course catalog for each department. Look for a course called “Directed Reading”. Just to pick a department, there were 15 sections of “Directed Reading” in the Sociology/Anthropology department last spring. The dept. averages between 15 and 20 majors. These can either be half credit or full credit courses. The senior thesis is a one credit course, one on one with a single professor.</p>
<p>More than one third of Swat’s official classes have fewer than 10 people and many of those have just a couple of kids, depending on the department. </p>
<p>For freshman year, every department offers (and everyone takes) “freshman seminars” which are capped at 12 people. These meet once a week for three hours (sometimes at night) and have basically replaced many of the “101” intro courses. These seminars are often centered around student presentations and also focus on the process of writing in that field, i.e. you turn in a draft of a paper, get it back with comments, and then turn in revised final version.</p>