Committee proposes honors program

A committee established to evaluate the feasibility of launching an honors program at Tech recently delivered a proposal to implement such a plan to the Office of the Provost.

The honors program, similar to those found at several other schools such as the University of California Berkeley, University of Florida and UGA, would be a merit-based, selective program that would allow accepted students to take a variety of courses in special "honors" classes.

These honors classes would have a number of differences from standard versions of the courses currently taught at Tech. The classes would be taught in significantly smaller sections, a move designed to encourage student-faculty interaction and a more inquiry-based learning environment.

The committee stressed, however, that the courses would not be substantially more difficult than standard courses. "They would cover pretty much the same material," said Gregory Nobles, a professor in the School of History, Technology and Society and co-chair of the committee responsible for the proposal.

In addition to a higher caliber of students, the committee hopes to involve a higher caliber of faculty in the program. The classes "would be taught by faculty...selected as people who are good teachers, good scholars. You want your best people...in that classroom," said Randall Engle, chair of the School of Psychology and the other committee co-chair.

Most of the new classes would be replacing core curriculum courses. "It starts with...taking some of the work...of the first two years that they'd be taking anyway and doing it in small classes with a more intensive kind of engagement with a professor," said Robert McMath, vice provost for undergraduate studies and academic affairs. "The committee did not try to dictate what would happen beyond that in the third and fourth years."

A number of the schools already offer honors versions of some introductory classes. "Some courses in the freshman and sophomore years...are already on the books in honors sections. We take those as a building block," McMath said.

In addition to honors versions of regular classes, several other concepts are planned for program participants. One planned type of class is a one-hour seminar with approximately 10 students and two faculty members reading a book or engaging in some other activity and discussion. "Students in the honors program would take one of those each semester," he said.

"The idea is they meet together once a week, a small group of students and a couple of faculty members, and have that opportunity just to engage in a less formal, less structured conversation than you might find with one person teaching a large class," Nobles said. According to Nobles, the two faculty members teaching these seminars would come from different disciplines, letting students approach an issue from two disparate perspectives.

The structure of the program would allow each major to develop its own honors track for students to undertake in their third and fourth year. "It would be open to students in all majors, and what some majors might for example say is, 'we will have honors opportunities in the form of research opportunities for students,'" McMath said.

This department-centric plan is likely to result in disparate states in the program's development between different major schools. "Even if a student is in a major that didn't have a wide array of opportunities for them yet, they can still be in the honors program and benefit from it," McMath said. "We don't yet have a fixed number of courses...for honors designation, but it would be a low-enough number-maybe 15-20 percent of their total course work-so that a student wouldn't be penalized if their particular major had not yet developed a lot of specific work for them."

According to McMath, the administration's goal in launching an honors program is to attract a higher caliber of students to Tech. "We believe there are some students who either come to Tech or consider Tech and go someplace else who would be very interested in this kind of challenge," he said. "We think in some cases students are choosing another school because of their honors programs."

"An awful lot of Georgia Tech students are interested in getting a degree, getting a job, making a lot of money...There's certainly nothing wrong with that; Georgia Tech has done a very good job working with that kind of student over the years," Engel said. "I think what we're looking at is individuals who really do want to be a little more diverse in their education than the typical [Tech] student, who might be interested in combining some things by looking at things in an interdisciplinary way."

The committee has also determined some basic aspects of the admission process for the program. "We decided early on that this was not going to be a program determined strictly by GPA and SAT," Nobles said. "That doesn't really make sense here because...you're dealing with an average SAT of [1300] and change."

Rather, the committee proposed that applicants be selected based on an essay and recommendation letters from high school teachers in two different disciplines (a humanity and a science) in addition to their grades.

Other features the committee hopes to include in the program are a variety of social activities and a residential component. "The goal here is to bring a level of vitality-vitality at an intellectual level, in ways that it's not easy to do at Georgia Tech right now," Engle said. "The goal is to do this both by having these students live together, having dinners with faculty and...just [encouraging] student-faculty interaction at a level that's kind of hard to do right now."

The scope of the program as outlined by the committee will have a variety of costs for administering the program, adding faculty and recruiting students. This is not expected to take funds away from other departments, however, Nobles said.

The program would instead be funded as a component of normal institute expansion, as well as with assistance from the next capital campaign. "We all hope that there will be some good, interested, and-one hopes-generous donor or set of donors," Nobles said.

The program will not have a scholarship component like many of Tech's peer institutions.

According to McMath, if the program is approved, the administration hopes to launch it by fall 2006. The program may also be substantially restructured from the current proposal as it passes through various stages of peer review.