To graduate summa, however, is quite a feat. You have to have a 12.00 GPA and have received high distinction from your major department, meaning you had to write a thesis (or complete comparable independent work) and the department had to think it was amazing. Your thesis will then be read again by the Committee of Six (the head honchos of the faculty), and they will then choose whether to recommend you for summa to the rest of the faculty. THEN, the Committee of Six and the dean of the faculty will review your entire record and will again give their recommendation to the faculty. There seems to be quite a gap in standards here, and the faculty is trying to figure out why and if honors are important at all.
The problem with the system as it stands, in the eyes of the faculty, is that thanks to our now infamous grade inflation, about half of the senior class graduates with cum laude and magna honors-a significant rise from years past. The College seems to think that this problem is a big one, and I can't say I disagree. I mean, who wants a "special award" that's really not special any more? And aren't Latin honors supposed to be a real mark of distinction? The faculty voted last Tuesday to have a committee look further into the issue and come up with possible solutions which then will be presented to the faculty for debate. So there's at least a year or so to go before any real changes take place, and they probably won't affect anyone who currently goes here, but that won't stop me from having my say.
A major concern is that students can get away with receiving Latin honors but have taken easy classes and not really undertaken any kind of independent work, which to some professors is the most important part of the college experience. This concern touches on a truckload of issues, however, and none of them is easily resolved. The faculty is less than pleased with the number of students who don't take a wide range of classes across many disciplines. They are honestly under the impression that humanities majors avoid the sciences and other "difficult" classes on purpose-to keep their GPAs up.
Now, I could pretend to be shocked ... but I'm not. Maybe they're right. It stands to reason that there are certain classes that drain a lot of time and energy and risk low grades (like math, science and foreign languages) and we all end up making choices about where to put our time. Studio art classes also take up a heck of a chunk of a person's schedule (Basic Drawing being my foil last semester), but some people decide that it's worth it. Some don't.
Another issue which has been raised is that Amherst chose not to make us follow a core curriculum. Therefore, unless they decide to change that ideal (which they very well may) they can attempt to influence what students take, but they can't control it.
The grade inflation issue is also important here, since some professors think that if we got lower grades, there would be fewer people receiving honors anyway. One professor pointed out, however, that our grade inflation problem is about the same as that of many comparable schools and we would only be doing our students a disservice by changing our pattern, since it might affect their acceptance into graduate programs. Such a reform would be hard to develop a strategy for and even harder to put into effect.
Many professors think, then, that we should base honors on percentages-with something like the top 10 percent of each graduating class (according to GPA) getting summa, the next 15 percent getting magna and so on. I have a huge problem with this proposal. At a school where we are supposed to be creating an intellectual community, competing for grades is just a juvenile idea. I didn't come here to get a higher average than someone else, I came to learn something and develop myself. Why create a competitive environment? Not to mention that we don't "rank" here; under this system, wouldn't we essentially be doing so? I think the idea of basing honors on how well people do in comparison to others is a bad one.
As I mentioned before, some professors feel very strongly about the need for college graduates to have done some kind of substantial independent work in their field. Some would even like to have theses be mandatory-period-and others would have it be a requirement for Latin honors.
One option is to have Latin honors reserved for thesis honors and have separate college honors for GPA distinctions. The student senate took a straw vote on the issues last Monday and unanimously supported looking into creating such a system with two types of honors. I think it's a great idea with a huge flaw. It comes down to a fault with the College, not the students. The fact is that there are numerous departments with so few professors, majors can't even get into the classes they want. These departments don't encourage students to write theses, because they couldn't handle every senior doing so. Many professors try to "talk you down" to a special topics class instead of a thesis; or others manage to be so impossible to work with that the student drops their project altogether.
Now, this is obviously not conducive to the faculty's desire for independent work, and unless the College reprioritizes some of its resources and gets us more professors, then many of us will have to graduate without ever having had the experience of in-depth study in a field we're passionate about.
If such a bifurcated system were adopted, however, would people start writing theses for the wrong reasons? Now, you can't get summa unless your grades and thesis are stellar, but I doubt that many people write a thesis-and an amazing one at that-just to get bumped up from magna to summa. But the desire for Latin honors might be strong enough that some people won't be sincerely serious about doing their own project, but will want (or feel pressured to receive) Latin honors. So again comes the question: why honors at all? Why can't we just be happy graduating from an academically challenging school and do our best? Why do we need the accolades? Maybe these are the issues that the faculty and students need to have a dialogue about in order to bring about real change.