Faculty Responsibility in Honors Project Contracts
The instructor is the most important link in the project chain. In the end, it is the faculty member who will determine if the submitted work is worthy of honors credit. As far as specifics go, faculty responsibility in the Honors Project Contract process is multi-faceted:
Syllabus
An instructor who is willing to do honors work with students is encouraged to put a note on his/her syllabus indicating this. The note might also refer the student to the Honors College Web page for more information.
Rejecting Honors Project Requests
The Honors Project process is collaborative and time-intensive. There are many valid reasons why an instructor may decide to deny a student‘s request to do honors work. Honors students are encouraged to be polite in entreaty and to accept “no” gracefully.
The Integrity of the Honors Project Process
Faculty are the guardians of the Honors Project process. From conception to completion, honors research should be original and closely supervised. Where recycling of prior work is suspected, instructors are urged to either cancel the project or take appropriate corrective measures. It is for this reason, also, that an honors project may not be based on the augmentation of regular coursework. Because the project process is intended to take the student into specific extra-curricular research, a longer or more research-intensive version of a course assignment unfortunately does not qualify for honors credit.
“Grading” Honors Projects
Technically, the honors project does not receive a grade. In terms of meriting honors credit, the project should be thought of as earning either a pass or a fail; that is to say, either the project is worthy of honors credit or it is not. When an instructor signs an honors contract indicating successful completion of the project, he/she affirms the following: “I certify that the above-named student has satisfactorily completed the Honors Contract in this course according to the standards of Honors.” The grade request on the contract form is for the final course grade. If this is not known at the time of project submission, please leave that blank.
If the faculty member deems that the submitted work is not honors level, then the contract should be regarded as not fulfilled and, therefore, not signed. The unsigned contract and the project should be submitted to the Honors College (MS #29) for filing. Pay/grade forms cannot be processed for unapproved projects unless the project is received in the Honors College.
Unfinished Honors Projects Contracts
About twenty to twenty-five percent of all signed Honors Projects Contracts are never completed. Understandably, there are various and predictable reasons for this. Instructors who know that an Honors Project Contract will, for whatever reason, not be finished should contact the Honors College Manager so that a note can be put in the database. Beyond this, instructors are urged not to hold the non-completion of an Honors Project Contract against a student in the calculation of the course grade. Honors work is superadded to regular course requirements. Thus, failure to complete Honors work should not be construed negatively.
Faculty Stipend
Projects forwarded to the Honors College that are either too short (less than 2000 words), that do not have the minimum number of secondary sources, that lack proper documentation, or that fail to comply with all published guidelines will be regarded as inadequately supervised. For this reason, the faculty stipend will not be processed for these projects.