1. University Honors Program
  2. Academics in the Honors Program
  3. Earning Honors Credits
  4. Honors Courses

Honors Courses

Honors Courses are designed with Honors students in mind!

The Honors Program collaborates with departments across campus to offer Honors Courses. Our current selection of courses is based on professor and student interest, and we're always working to update existing courses and facilitate more opportunities for Honors students! 

Because professors are experts in their fields, we ask them to use their experience and expertise to best determine what particular tasks and coursework work with their discipline, the Program's goals, and Honors students' needs. 

Individual Honors courses have a lot of variety, but they typically have some key shared features, including:

  • Smaller Class Sizes: We aim to have Honors courses about half the size of their regular counterparts!
  • Discussion Based Instruction: Collaborative discussions with the professor and other students instead of lecture-heavy classes and memorization
  • Applied Learning: Focus on using skills learned through coursework to address real-world problems
  • Attention to Exploration: Thinking critically about the topics introduced in class and generating new ideas
  • Community Engagement: Interrogating how the course material affects others and implementing ideas with integrity and flexibility  

Professors use our Student Learning Outcomes as a benchmark for the direction of their Honors instruction. 

Check out our Student Learning Outcomes 禄

Honors Courses fall into three categories:

These are the Honors versions of courses that have preexisting regular counterparts. Enrollment is restricted to Honors students and these courses will replace the regular version of the course in students' degree requirements. Students will learn the same core skills, but have the opportunity to engage with more (or more complex) material and complete more involved projects. Instruction will be discussion based and we try to limit enrollment in these courses to approximately half of the size of their regular counterparts. 

  • For example: English 115 has covers the same core subjects as English 102, but only Honors students can enroll in it. 

Honors Program Courses are unique, interdisciplinary courses that could only happen in Honors! They are not required by any current degree plan and would be electives for the students. These courses give professors and students the opportunity to dive deep into niche specialty interests or bring together different topics in an interesting and compelling way. 

  • These courses begin with the prefix HONR
  • For example: the Director of Honors, Dr. Sandoz, uses her background as a distinguished professor of Psychology to team up with the University's Provost, Dr. Hebert (who has a PhD in Statistics) to teach HONR 400: The Human Context to a small group of Honors students every Spring semester.
  • Honors Baccalaureate Thesis preparation courses are Honors Program Courses as well.

Honors students sign up for the Honors version of the course, and they attend class alongside a group of students signed up for the regular version of the same course. 

The professor will assign the Honors students additional coursework to help them meet our Student Learning Outcomes as well as completing the work assigned to the entire class. 

Students have the option to sign up for two different versions of the same class during registration, but both versions attend the same course. The Honors version can have the HONR prefix or a different departmental prefix in the course catalog. The Honors Program publishes course offerings every semester, so be sure to double-check your courses to make sure you get the Honors Credit you need!

Explore our full schedule of classes 禄