Honors Courses Honors course descriptions About one month before fall and spring registration, professors of honors courses are asked to submit a short description of their plans. The Honors Program Director compiles these course descriptions and distributes them to all honors students and all faculty advisors. Honors course descriptions should be as specific as possible about what the honors section will require and how it will differ from a regular section of that course. Students are told that honors classes differ from regular classes in various ways, but particularly in devoting less time to elementary skills and information while stressing personal initiative and greater depth of learning. The benefits of honors classes, we tell them, include smaller than average class size, greater freedom of exploration, exceptional intellectual stimulation, credit toward graduation with honors, and opportunity to build relationships with other honors students and some of Calvin's best teachers.
Honors courses come in many forms.
Some honors courses are very innovative and wholly unlike regular sections of the course, while others are enriched versions of the regular sections. Expectations of honors students Calvin aims in its Honors Program to promote greater initiative and independence, deeper learning, and closer collaboration among honors students and faculty than in regular courses. This does not necessarily mean more work for honors students than for others, but it does mean a different kind of work, and perhaps more individual attention from the professor than in a typical class. Professors have complete authority in determining how much to ask of honors students, what kind of work to require, and how to grade that work. But we must remember that honors students, especially those in their first year of college, can be overwhelmed as easily as any other student.