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What Is an Honors Student
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Achterberg, Cheryl L. |
| Copyright Year | 2005 |
| Abstract | "There still persists an uneasy feeling that the young intellectual is standoffish, unrealistic, noisy, nonconformist ... There also exists the opposite view ... intelligent, talented, creative, self-confident, poised, articulate, brilliant." --Robertson, 1966 Honors programs and colleges are commonplace in U.S. higher education today with programs in 60% of all four-year institutions and over 40% of all two-year institutions (Baker, Reardon, and Riordan, 2000). The research literature about honors education and/or honors students, however, is sparse (Achterberg, 2004; Long and Lange, 2002; Reihman, Varhus and Whipple, 1995; Roemer, 1984). Hypothetically, experience of nearly a century should generate recognizable patterns (Cohen, 1966a). The purpose of this paper is to review what literature exists to describe honors students, and it ends with a normative definition of an honors student. It necessarily focuses on traditionally-aged students due to lack of information about adult learners as honors students. REVIEW AND DISCUSSION It is important to point out that, while the NCHC has described the desired characteristics of honors programs (Cummings, 1994), there is no such definition for honors students. Rather, the term honors student is generic and relative or relational to other students within a single institution (Stoller, 2004). There are few characteristics of honors students that can be standardized, measured, or uniformly compared across institutions. There is, however, a certain ideology associated with honors and honors students, namely that honors students are in some way "superior" to other students in their home institution (Cohen 1966b; Robertson, 1966); "high ability" and "best and brightest" are also commonly used descriptors (Austin, 1986; Geiger, 2002; Shushok, 2002). This ideology forms the rationale for creating separate organizational structures based on academic or personal merit within higher education (Berger, Berger, and Kellner, 1973). Galinova (2005) described this ideology or belief system as a "rational mythology" of honors educators because it is a "theoretically articulated proposition of social reality," unquestionably accepted as a truth even in the absence of evidence. These beliefs might also be called a paradigm (Kuhn, 1970) as they are widely shared and they have gained an "indisputable authority" that has permeated higher education in the late 20th century. There are literally tens of thousands of honors students in the U.S. (an estimated 35-36,000 honors students attend Big 10 institutions alone). Who are they? Or more specifically, what characterizes honors students? Honors students are obviously selected. That said, they can be defined by selection criteria (Geiger, 2000; 2002), if nothing else. Yet, selection criteria vary widely across institutions, so honors students are also variable from one institution to another. The most common kinds of selection criteria used are grade point averages and standardized test scores (SAT or ACT). Hence, Tacha (1986) summarily concluded that honors students are excellent test-takers with high psychometrics, but what do the numbers signify? There are no "bright lines" above which a student is formally recognized as an honors student nor below which he or she is not. The numerical cut-offs vary by hundreds of points depending on institution (Geiger, 2000; 2004; see Digby, 2002 for numerous examples). The rationale behind GPA and test score criteria is that the numbers reflect academic aptitude both in a single day (in the case of the exam) and across time, usually 3-4 high school years (in the case of GPA) (Stoller, 2004). Either way, that leaves us with honors students as mere numbers on a page, an irony given that honors education is designed specifically to not treat the honors student as a number (Cohen, 1966a; Austin, 1986). Adding insult to injury, Schwartz (2005) asserts that students in the upper academic strand at highly selective institutions (and, presumably, highly selective programs within institutions) differ so little from each other that the numbers are, in effect, meaningless. … |
| Starting Page | 75 |
| Ending Page | 75 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 6 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.saddleback.edu/faculty/thuntley/papers/achterberg_2005.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1156&context=nchcjournal |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
