National Collegiate Honors Council
Date of this Version
2011
Abstract
Butler University is a comprehensive master’s university of approximately 4,000 undergraduate students with five colleges: the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the College of Education; the College of Business; the Jordan College of Fine Arts; and the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. The Butler University Honors Program is an interdisciplinary program open to undergraduates from all five colleges. Incoming students admitted to Butler who meet certain benchmark requirements (1320/30 or higher SAT/ACT or top five percent of graduating class) are invited to apply to our honors program. If students perform well in their first year at the university, the Butler Honors Program may invite them to join at the middle or end of the academic year. In addition, students may petition to join the program at any time provided they are able to complete its requirements prior to graduation.
The requirements of our honors program are: completion of four interdisciplinary honors courses; completion of a departmental honors course, an upper-level research course offered within the student’s academic major; completion of a thesis proposal as part of a thesis-preparation course; participation in a designated number of cultural events—plays, readings or lectures by visiting writers, concerts, ethnic festivals, and the like; and completion of an honors thesis, which includes an oral presentation of the thesis project. While we have approximately ten percent of the overall student body participating in the honors program, the past several years have shown that only between five and seven percent of the graduating class is fully completing the program. An analysis of the attrition information from our program indicated that we lost most of our honors students after the four required honors courses, some time during the thesis preparation process. In addition, particular academic programs demonstrated a higher attrition level than others, majors we determined were “at risk” for non-completion of the honors thesis. This information provided us sufficient motivation to find methods to address the attrition rate.
Comments
Published in Honors in Practice, Volume 7. Copyright 2011 National Collegiate Honors Council