OUR VIEWS Consensus Opinion

Administrators are considering creating a Tech honors program with the goals of attracting a "higher caliber of students" to Tech and providing them with alternatives to the traditional curriculum. The program would offer select students a chance to take a variety of core courses and major courses at an honors level. However, as it stands now, there are several major flaws with the proposed plans and its logic.

First, the idea that we need an honors program to attract a higher caliber of students to come to Tech is misguided. Harvard, MIT and Princeton are just a few of the many schools that don't have honors programs, which are better suited to large state schools, such as the University of Georgia, that need to attract talented students away from top schools like Tech by giving them scholarship money, smaller classes and other perks.

Second, honors classes will not be designed to be "harder" but rather to be taught in a smaller setting with the best professors. This should be an Institute goal for all courses. An honors program would cheat the majority of students by offering only a select few access to the highest-quality teaching resources.

The selection process under the proposed plan also seems flawed. Students would not be selected based on higher SAT scores or GPA. Rather, they would get into the program based on high school teacher recommendations and essays. Almost every student applying to Tech should be able to obtain glowing letters from their teachers, and while essays are a valuable assessment tool, performance during the first year of college might be a better way to gauge which students are honors material.

There are also other significant problems that will have to be addressed if this program is to be successful. Tech's academic programs do not lend themselves well to implementing an honors track. Our students have far fewer generic core requirements than do most schools with honors programs. A large number of honors courses would have to be developed within each major and there would be no way to ensure that an honors class in one major was comparable to one in another major.

While the present proposal for an honors program seems like a bad idea, some of the components are certainly worth pursuing. These include the creation of additional accelerated classes, opportunities for interdisciplinary learning in seminars, smaller class sizes and putting Tech's best professors in positions that favor and compliment their talents. Our current selection of interdisciplinary, social science and humanities courses is lacking. There's no reason why only a select few should be able to partake in challenging courses and have interesting classroom experiences-everyone at Tech deserves that opportunity.