Certainly it’s no secret that AU aspires to be recognized among the top academic universities in the country. What better way to do that than to have an exclusive program that benefits students of the highest academic caliber? Enter the University Honors Program.
Each year, 15 percent of admitted freshmen are invited to participate in this program, and other students can go through a self-nomination process to join.
But an honors program can only be successful when it is able to effectively cater to the needs of all of the students it serves and add substantial value to their education. Unfortunately, my experience in AU’s Honors Program since my freshman year has shown me that it falls far short of meeting this goal.
My primary concern with the program is that its assortment of Honors classes is heavily skewed towards only a handful of subjects, primarily related to government and international studies.
Even though there are 65 undergraduate majors offered at AU, only four subjects have more than three Honors sections offered for them. In my case, there are only two regular Honors courses offered within my major and none for either of my minors.
Honors tries to make up for this deficiency by allowing students to add an Honors course supplement to non-Honors upper-level courses. Adding a supplement requires students to do an additional high-level assignment for the course.
But considering that a total of 30 Honors credits are required to meet the program’s graduation requirements, that’s a lot of extra work to do on top of your already-rigorous classes if your fields of study require you to rely entirely on supplements.
The other benefits that the Honors Program touts are also fairly hollow.
AU has recently shoehorned virtually all of the Honors floors into Hughes Hall, preventing Honors students who want to live on an Honors floor from having a choice of dorms on campus and essentially segregating them from the rest of the on-campus AU students.
And then there’s Honors 101, a mandatory zero-credit class for fall-semester freshmen that creates small groups that are supposed to do various social activities throughout the year.
But in my experience, everyone in my Honors 101 group was too busy keeping up with classes, getting involved with extracurricular activities and simply trying to get used to living on their own for the first time to have any time to spend doing random activities for a zero-credit class.
Now, I’m sure that my opinions of the Honors Program are not representative of all Honors students.
For a number of majors, wherein academic skills such as critical thinking and research are heavily emphasized, having a diploma indicating that you graduated with honors is a significant reflection of your studies at AU.
But I’m a Communications major. The assignments that I do in my classes are not going to matter as much as the skills that I master outside of my classes.
My future career aspirations will benefit far more from the experience that I gain through extracurricular organizations here at AU than they will from an Honors sticker on my diploma. And as such, it’s hard for me to feel compelled to go out of my way to meet the strict requirements of a program that provides few resources of its own related to my fields of study.
Perhaps Honors just isn’t right for me; I’ll concede that. But I do believe that the Honors Program needs to do a better job of representing all of the high-achieving students at AU, not just those who happen to study in the School of Public Affairs or the School of International Service.
Honors should be more than just tea talks and free cake; it needs to provide meaningful educational value to all of AU’s high-achieving students.
Douglas Bell is a junior in SOC. Please send comments and responses to:
edpage@theeagleonline.com
