Vol. 38, No. 18

3-4-2004
By: Joni Bentz Seal

Second phase of honors and scholars review complete

Using information provided by a self study and interviewing administrators, faculty and students, an internal review committee has completed its assessment of the university’s Honors and Scholars Program, finding that it is essentially fulfilling its goals of offering students an enriched academic experience to achieve their full potential and recruiting and retaining high-ability students.
The Committee to Review Honors and Scholars Programs was convened last fall by Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Barbara Snyder to examine the role of the program in relation to the colleges; assess its effectiveness in recruitment, retention and intellectual content, including the Honors Collegium; and review the relationship between the honors and scholars programs. An evaluation by an external team, yet to be named, will be the final phase of the review process and is expected to conclude spring quarter, according to Snyder.
Chaired by Distinguished University Professor Emeritus J. Robert Warmbrod from the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, the committee found that honors was advancing toward its founding mission and that improvements and initiatives in line with the committee’s findings were already underway, thanks to the leadership of Associate Provost Linda Harlow, who was named permanent director of honors and scholars less than a year ago.
“The internal review committee has affirmed our goals of helping to provide a rich, challenging program for our most able students and to attract stronger and better students each year to the university,” Harlow said. “Encouraging and enabling our students to take challenging honors courses, engage in research, and study abroad are certainly goals that we are working on in collaboration with the colleges.”
Key findings
Warmbrod said it is vitally important to make clear that undergraduate honors at Ohio State is a decentralized system of honors programs administered and conducted by a number of units.
“Both the substance and rigor of honors programs are determined by the colleges, schools and departments, and ultimately by faculty who teach courses completed by honors students, supervise students’ research and advise students,” he said.
According to the committee’s report, 50 percent of OSU’s undergraduate honors students are enrolled in the five Colleges of the Arts and Sciences; 25 percent in the College of Engineering; 15 percent in the Fisher College of Business; and the remaining 10 percent distributed among eight colleges and schools.
These programs are loosely coordinated by the Honors and Scholars Center, whose major responsibilities include recruiting students who quality for honors status upon admission; conducting an extensive array of co-curricular activities, including the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum; overseeing the recently established Honors Collegium; and administering the scholars programs.
The report concluded that the program’s formal role regarding the academic content of college honors programs is limited to providing enrichment funds for the development of new honors courses and awarding scholarships to students who write a senior thesis, and that several policy and programmatic issues pertaining to the relationship between the university’s honors program and the college and school honors programs warrant further study and resolution.
“The committee suggested clarification of honors expectations among the colleges,” Harlow said. “The colleges seem to welcome this opportunity to better define an honors student, and therefore, who should enjoy the various privileges of honors — a standard that we can check and hold students to. This will ensure that those receiving honors privileges are performing at a level that is agreed upon across the board.”
Harlow said some variation among the colleges is fine because different fields have different needs, “but there is some possibility we could improve by having more consistency and more centralized coordination,” she said.
The committee also recommended that the honors program be designated as an official academic center of the university, and intensify efforts to secure funding by working with the Office of Development.
Recruitment and retention
Ohio State’s honors program has an admission target of 20 percent of entering freshmen. In Autumn 2003, 24 percent (1,517) of entering students were accepted for honors status. But one element of discussion throughout the program’s history has been to what extent should honors focus on recruiting versus providing an enriched undergraduate experience.
“The committee concluded, as we have, that recruiting is an extremely important part of why the honors enterprise exists and that there is no conflict between the two goals,” said Martha Garland, vice provost and dean of undergraduate studies. “Obviously, if you recruit good students, you have the obligation to give them as good a program as possible.”
Honors students are offered a wide variety of activities for intellectual engagement and enrichment — challenging courses, research and study abroad opportunities, dedicated advising, an array of co-curricular activities and residence living experiences. While the committee concluded these activities were provided, it was unable to find data to determine the extent to which honors students take advantage of them. It also noted some of these opportunities, such as the study abroad programs and certain college research components, have a limited number of spaces.
“We have already made some changes in that respect,” said Harlow. “For example, we’ve now added a second international study-abroad trip for honors students, increased the number of new co-curricular activities, and instituted a series of six undergraduate research workshops throughout the year to encourage more participation in research.”
In addition to creating more opportunities, the committee recommended that students take more honors or appropriate upper-level courses; that mechanisms for better monitoring the progress of honors students in the colleges and schools be developed; and that priority scheduling be decoupled from honors status to encourage honors students to take advantage of the program’s other benefits. Harlow said priority scheduling is a complex and misunderstood concept that attracts much controversy, but is necessary to allow high-ability students to maximize their time to pursue activities strongly encouraged by the program.
“The purpose of priority scheduling is to enable honors students to fulfill high expectations,” she said. “We expect them to take challenging courses, earn double majors and minors — often from different colleges, perform research and participate in co-curricular and service activities. They tend to be the campus leaders — studying abroad, doing internships and conducting research. We need to help them to accommodate all these activities, and the way we help them is through priority scheduling.”
Noting that honors needs to play a more proactive role in preparing those wishing to conduct research or secure high-level post-graduate opportunities, the committee recommended further development of the Honors Collegium. Initiated in 2002, the Honors Collegium prepares select high-ability students to compete for prestigious post-baccalaureate fellowships, scholarships and graduate study.
“We have not had as many successes in getting those awards at Ohio State as we think the quality of our students should justify,” Garland said. “We’ve been trying to develop an approach that would help better prepare students for those opportunities, plus enrich at the highest level the activities of those students. The Collegium is our medium to provide this.”
In addition, the committee strongly recommended that the honors designation be reserved for students who are actively pursuing an honors program and for entering honors students during the first three quarters of enrollment, and that the program strive for a higher proportion of these students to graduate “With Honors” and/or “With Distinction.”
Scholars relationship
Warmbrod said the primary focus of the committee’s review was the honors programs, and that its examination of scholars programs pertained solely to the issue of the relationship between honors and scholars programs.
“The committee concluded that while there is substantial crossover between honors and scholars programs, both programs benefit from these close ties and a common administrative structure, and therefore, it should continue,” he said.
The committee acknowledged that implementing many of the recommendations, such as hiring of a full-time associate director for scholars programs, would be possible only with an increase in funding.
“Significant progress has been made in advancing the honors agenda at the university since the original review in 1985,” Warmbrod said. “However, additional funding for an expansion of honors curricular and co-curricular activities, the Honors Collegium, and facility maintenance for the Kuhn Honors and Scholars House are all necessary for further strengthening of honors programs.
For the full report of the committee’s findings, visit http://oaa.osu.edu/Reports/honors_scholars_04_toc.html.

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