Criteria for All Types of Honors Courses

As one goal of virtually all honors courses, regardless of field, the Honors Committee welcomes especially articulate communication and self-expression in person and in writing. In addition, to receive approval from the Committee, you must design your Honors Course to meet some of the following criteria:

• Sophisticated, challenging thinking: critical, analytic, quantitative, scientific, interdisciplinary, and/or creative. 
• Active employment of current discourse, methods, techniques, and theories in the relevant field or fields of inquiry. 
• Critical investigation of primary as well as secondary sources. 
• Independent learning with opportunities to exercise intellectual initiative. 
• Pursuit of one or more research projects. 
• Experiences that take advantage of the rich cultural, intellectual, institutional, and environmental resources of the New York area. 
• Synthesis of discourse, knowledge, methods, theories and/or modes of thinking from two or more disciplines. 
• Intensive writing and revision which facilitate growth as a thinker and as a writer, with publishable writing as an ultimate goal. 
• Substantive participation by students in relevant professional activities such as a conference.