Honors Program

The Honors Program offers courses in a wide range of disciplines, emphasizing academic rigor and pedagogical creativity. The Honors Program encourages academic independence in its students by emphasizing inquiry, self-direction, and self-regulation in all academic endeavors. The program celebrates an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Through tutorials and seminars, honors students are challenged to synthesize information across disciplines, developing a broad awareness of knowledge connectedness. Honors students are challenged to apply the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom in ways that provide stewardship and service to the Marymount community, the surrounding DC community, and the environment. The Honors Program, through its academic and extracurricular programs, encourages initiative, responsibility, integrity, and collaboration among its students.

Honors students must fulfill all program requirements, maintain a minimum GPA of 3.5, and participate in Honors Program events and activities to maintain program benefits. Participants must earn at least a B in each honors course.

The professional advising center will provide primary academic advising. The honors director will provide additional advising specific to the honors curriculum.

Curriculum Overview

Students in the Honors Program are required to earn at least 24 credits of honors coursework. Typically, students are expected to earn all honors credits while enrolled at Marymount. The curriculum is designed so that each incoming first-year student in the Honors Program completes one honors course (3 credits) per semester to successfully achieve the 24-credit-hour requirement. Students admitted to the Honors Program after the first semester will be expected to take more than one honors course per semester in some instances to successfully complete the 24-credit-hour requirement. Students are permitted to enroll in a maximum of two honors courses per semester.

• HON 101 The Quest: An Introduction to the Honors Program (3 credits)
• Honors Seminars (9 credits)
• Honors Tutorials: one Traditional (HON 200) and one Advanced (HON 300) (6 credits)
• HON 399 Research Tutorial: Thesis Proposal (3 credits)
• HON 400 Research Tutorial: Thesis (3 credits)

The Curriculum

HON 101 The Quest: An Introduction to the Honors Program: This seminar is devoted to introducing first-year honors students to the Honors Program, as well as various forms of scholarship, and the skills necessary for academic inquiry (i.e., “The Quest” for knowledge). Students participate in a variety of experiential learning activities, learn how to lead and participate in group discussion, conduct research, write, and present a traditional undergraduate research paper. Honors students take this course to fulfill EN 101 requirement.

Honors Seminars: At least three courses (9 credits) must be completed in Honors Seminars. The Honors Seminars, typically 12 to 15 students, are taught by select faculty who are encouraged to construct innovative and rigorous courses for the benefit of honors students. These credits may be fulfilled in honors-designated sections of the Liberal Arts Core courses, in honors contract courses, graduate seminars (with instructor’s permission), and in courses created by Marymount faculty especially for the Honors Program. This approach provides breadth in the honors curriculum while simultaneously allowing students to earn honors credits in specific interest areas and majors.

Liberal Arts Core honors classes: Students may choose to take Honors Seminars that satisfy the university’s Liberal Arts Core requirements. Honors sections of these courses, developed and offered by individual professors and schools, will present a greater challenge to those enrolled in non-honors sections. On rare occasions, these honors sections will be open to students outside the program with approval from the honors director and the instructor. Past examples include TRS 100, PH 301, and PSY 311.

Honors contract courses: Students may earn three honors seminar credits through our Honors Contract Course policy. This is where students negotiate with a faculty member to make a non honors course count for honors seminar credit by adding additional, higher level coursework. This option is only available to juniors and seniors who have taken at least one traditional honors seminar. Please see the honors handbook and the honors contract form for more information.

Honors seminars: Qualified Marymount faculty are specifically recruited by the director to develop new and innovative undergraduate seminars for honors students. These courses demonstrate pedagogical creativity as well as academic rigor.

Graduate courses: Honors students may petition to take a graduate course for honors credit. They will need approval of the instructor, the school director, and the honors director. This is normally done during the senior year and is especially encouraged for students who intend to pursue graduate study in a particular field.

Course overload: Honors students may petition to take up to two credit hours above the standard maximum of 18 credit hours of academic coursework in a given semester without incurring an overage charge. Students will need approval of their advisor and the director.

Honors Tutorials: Honors Tutorials begin in the student’s sophomore year. There are two types: the Traditional Tutorial and the Research Tutorial.

HON 200/HON 300 Traditional and Advanced Tutorials: The traditional undergraduate tutorial, developed in the Middle Ages at Oxford and Cambridge, is an intimate and intense learning experience. Traditional Tutorials consist of one to two students meeting once a week over a nine-week period with a professor on a specialized topic. The topic need not be in the student’s major. During each one- to two-hour meeting, students are expected to have completed readings from an agreed-upon list and to have produced a short response paper; students will read the paper and receive feedback on it. At the end of the semester, students are required to produce a traditional research paper and an annotated bibliography.

HON 399 Research Tutorial: Thesis Proposal: The thesis proposal process is typically commenced during the second semester of the junior year, is conducted one-on-one with the student’s identified faculty mentor, and must be focused on the topic of the student’s Senior Honors Thesis. Each student will work with a mentor on a scholarly research project. At the end of the semester, the student is required to submit a research proposal, approved by the faculty mentor, to the honors director for review. Once the proposal is approved and, if necessary, revised, the student may then commence the research for the Senior Honors Thesis (HON 400). At the end of this tutorial and during the senior year, the student will produce and defend their Senior Honors Thesis.

HON 400 Research Tutorial: Honors Thesis: Honors students, during their senior year, will work with a faculty mentor on their thesis. Successful completion of the thesis is required to graduate with honors. Students must earn a B or higher for the course to count toward their Honors Program requirements.

Thesis Defense: The Senior Honors Thesis will typically be 30+ pages, exclusive of the scholarly apparatus, or 15+ pages for papers that accompany creative/design projects. All honors students are required to present and defend their theses before a committee consisting of the thesis advisor, a second reader, and the honors director or the director's designee. This normally occurs during the spring semester of the senior year or during the student’s last semester at the university. Thesis defenses are open to the entire university community. Student theses are archived on the Library and Learning Services website. Students must successfully pass their thesis defense to graduate with honors.

Oxford Summer Study Program

The Honors Program’s mix of seminars, tutorials, and lectures fits Marymount's intimate educational environment, pays tribute to the liberal arts tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, and prepares Marymount honors students for graduate and professional school. To reinforce these aims and to provide a global perspective for honors students, the program offers 10 tuition scholarships to students every other summer for a six-week study tour at the University of Oxford. Students take a total of six academic credits: three credits with a Marymount faculty member in an Advanced Honors Seminar and three credits with an Oxford faculty member in a Traditional or Advanced Tutorial (HON 200/300). They also travel on sponsored trips to London, Stratford, Windsor, and other British sites. Some Marymount students choose to spend an entire semester abroad studying at Oxford or schools throughout Europe and Asia.

Contact the Honors Program director or director of the Center for Global Engagement for further information.