To qualify for graduation with honors, a student must have been a participant in the Honors Program and have completed 24 hours of Honors class credit and a total of 134 semester hours of academic credit, including participation in twointerdisciplinary Honors seminars. The student will receive 6 credit hours of departmental course credit when completing the senior thesis. To be considered for admission to the Honors Program, either when first entering SHSU or as a continuing SHSU student, a student must make special application to the Honors Program Office. Incoming freshmen are considered eligible for consideration if they have a composite SAT1 score of 1200 or above, or a composite ACT score of 27 or above, or have graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class. For transfer or continuing students, eligibility is based upon a college cumulative GPA of 3.4 or better.
Admission is competitive, dependent upon the pool of applications received for any given year.
Once accepted into the Honors Program, a student must maintain a 3.25 overall grade point average while at Sam Houston State University in order to continue participation in the Honors Program. In an attempt to provide unique, broadly integrative, interdisciplinary educational experiences to students, the Honors Seminar series of classes has been established. These courses are expected to be highly interactive between professors and students and will generally involve student paper presentations. The courses are designed specifically for the Honors curriculum, but are open to enrollment by any member of the SHSU student body if space is available and with the consent of the Honors Program director. This course is designed to deal with contemporary social, economic, political and international issues.