Center for Academic Excellence

Honors Seminars

Honors courses at Marshall present special topics designed by some of Marshall’s best professors to interest, engage and inspire students like you to pursue academic and professional interests. The seminars’ low faculty-student ratio, their focus on active learning, their unique topics, and their professors−often award-winners, always committed teachers−make them a major benefit of honors. See responses to Frequently Asked Questions for more details on the seminars.

The honors seminars:

• challenge but also engage you through active learning, defined below
• focus on topics outside and beyond the regular curriculum
• use an interdisciplinary model−apply ideas from one area of study or framework to another
• have limited class sizes, promoting student-faculty, student-student interaction
• may be accelerated (cover more material than a regular course) or advance more slowly (engage the material in more depth)
• use primary/original sources
• stress discovery and exploration as well as learning
• help improve and/or teach communication skills, written and oral, formal and informal

To meet these goals, honors course work may involve:

• active learning, including frequent discussion, student group work in and out of class, fieldwork, student panels, collaborative learning rather than lectures; active, not passive learning;
• substantial out-of-class preparation−reading, notes, discussion questions;
• in-class writing to pin-down insights, inspire discussion;
• grading standards that reward hard work but also demonstrate thinking as well as knowledge;
• projects and essays as well as examinations that prompt thought even as they evaluate learning.

Honors Options

The Honors Option allows you to get honors credit for a regular class through an agreement with the professor who assigns honors-level work or projects to you. Honors work for the H-option, like honors work in our seminars, involves greater depth or breadth, higher-level mental processes and products, and more engagement with the professor.
 

What is Honors-Level Work?

Assignments for the H-option should raise and alter the quality of work: the new work should show critical thinking skills, involve written and/or oral communication, and challenge the student intellectually. For example, if a regular course requirement is a book report that summarizes content, an honors assignment should analyze the argument’s validity; if the rest of the class reads a textbook summarizing historical texts and then present an oral report, the honors student should read a primary source and report on it; if students perform an experiment following steps provided by the professor, the honors student attempts to develop his or her own experimental process, and so forth.

For more information call or e-mail the Honors College contacts shown in this web-site.

Honors Newsletter

Like Honors 101 mentoring, the Honors newsletter provides another forum for you to meet fellow scholars and offers one hour of credit toward honors requirements. IF you decide to work for the newsletter, you must: attend required meetings called by the student editor or by the Assistant Director of Honors; write at least two substantial and useable articles on honors issues and personalities per semester for publication. For this class, CAE looks for students who enjoy writing, are fluent in standard English, and work easily on group projects.

Honors Mentoring

If you enjoy the Honors College and its benefits and also envision helping new honors students, you can participate in the Honors Program by serving as a Peer Mentor for a section of HON 101, the Introduction to College course that honors students take. As a peer mentor, you receive one hour of honors credit for the work, and may mentor during more than one semester. As mentor, an honors student attends all classes, helps the professor answer questions about campus-life and honors, and otherwise supports the professor’s goals for the course. CAE seeks friendly, motivated honors students who enjoy advising and supporting other students. The focus of mentorship is on the new student’s adjustment to campus life but you also may be asked specific questions about the honors program. In this role, you represent the Honors College.