Advice, Guidelines, and Best Practices for Each Honors Course
This guide provides advice and best practices for each of the four kinds of honors courses offered through the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers.
Departments and professors design honors courses in different ways, but in general, we find that the most successful honors course experiences
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Provide students with closer contact with faculty (usually tenure/tenure track faculty)
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Present students with a more challenging or in-depth experience (e.g., more experiential-based activities, more extensive investigation of implications and connections, etc.) than they would have in a non-honors section or course
In addition to more personal engagement, some of the ways that faculty and departments create an honors experience include:
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Trips, involving fieldwork or performances or cultural interaction
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Special or additional work (problem sets, essays, exercises)
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More in-depth work (longer essays, expanded scope of materials)
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Outside speakers (in person or via Skype or similar platforms)
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Special research experiences (in the field, the lab, or archive or involving particular kinds of research papers)
In all but a few cases, the school-based honors programs (including School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program) and the Honors College share coursework. This means that a given class/professor may be hosting students from all or many of the honors communities across New Brunswick.
Four Broad Categories of Honors Courses
Questions
Please feel free to contact us with questions or to express interest in designing an honors class:
Matt Matsuda, Academic Dean of the Honors College or Jennifer Jones, Dean of the SAS Honors Program
