Academic Overview

Academics are at the core of the Honors Program. Honors students may take advantage of any or all of the academic components of the Honors Program during their years at Carthage.

Some students will focus on just one or two and will be rewarded with interesting discoveries and challenging learning experiences. Other students, who successfully complete all components of the Honors Program and are granted "All College Honors" at graduation, demonstrate excellence both within a particular academic field and across the curriculum. They are expected to commit themselves to rigorous study of a specific subject, and to demonstrate intellectual balance and flexibility through their ability to make connections across disciplines.

The Honors program can be partitioned into three main components.

Foundation Component
This component consists of enriched foundational courses that encourage students to explore their academic options and intellectual abilities. Students will enroll in Honors sections of the interdisciplinary Western Heritage Program and complete Honors Contracts in 1000 and 2000 level courses across the curriculum. Typically, Honors students complete this portion of the program during their first three or four terms.

Concentration Component
By completing Honors work in advanced courses from their chosen discipline, Honors students delve deeper into their studies and work more closely with professors in their major. Such work forms the core of the concentration component of the overall Honors curriculum. By completing just the requirements within this component, students in most departments earn "Honors in the Major" at graduation. Students are responsible for contacting their particular department chair and inquiring about possible additional requirements.

Integration Component
Honors students stretch themselves across the curriculum, and compare or contrast their studies in a particular discipline with other ways of knowing, learning, and doing when they complete Honors Contracts in their Carthage Symposium course. In these courses, students work with two professors from different fields who show them different approaches to the same material. For example a Religion and Physics professor may team up on a topic such as cosmology. The capstone course in the Honors Program is an interdisciplinary senior colloquium designed to provide opportunities for intellectual synthesis and closure, and to cultivate advanced principles of scholarship.

Honors courses at all levels offer additional opportunities and benefits. Almost all courses in the Honors Program parallel regular College requirements, to ensure that Honors students are not required to complete additional credits for graduation. Honors work is not necessarily greater in quantity, but it always involves a higher quality of thinking and understanding. Some Honors courses may offer a more theoretical approach to the subject in question, while other courses may encourage students to apply their knowledge with greater precision. Students will experience the support of faculty members and fellow students as they seek the challenges and rewards of scholarly life throughout the Honors Program.

"What I expect in teaching an Honors course is that the students will be more committed to intellectual life, more interested in making connections between various disciplines, more curious and eager to think and to learn. Ultimately I am trying to provide an environment and a model for learning in which active, self-directed learning can flourish."

James Lochtefeld
Associate Professor of Religion

"The Honors Program gave me the opportunity to take my educational experience to the next level. It allowed me to become involved in areas of academia that I would otherwise not have explored, and broadened my understanding of the world around me."

Chaz Rzeplinski, '09