Faculty Approve Changes to Latin Honors Policy

The faculty voted to approve new eligibility criteria for summa and magna cum laude honors — the highest of the Latin degree honors, which are only awarded to students who complete a senior thesis — in a faculty meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 7. The new policy, which was developed over two years by the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP), passed 68-48 after a contentious discussion that began at the previous faculty meeting held on Dec. 6.

While maintaining the practice of having both a thesis-based departmental recommendation and a college-level determination, the new policy bases the college-level determination of Latin honors on (1) a student’s median grade across all full-credit courses taken for a letter grade in the Five College Consortium, and (2) the fulfillment of a breadth requirement, which stipulates that a student have taken and passed at least one course or two half courses at Amherst in each of four disciplinary categories: arts, humanities, sciences and mathematics, and social and behavioral sciences.

The new requirements replace the previous criterion which determined eligibility for summa and magna honors based on a student’s class rank, as measured by their overall GPA.

“The goal of this proposal is threefold: to make Latin honors determinations more transparent and equitable, to eliminate uncertainty surrounding class rank, and to encourage exploration of the curriculum,” the CEP wrote in its proposal to the faculty.

Many faculty members took issue with the newly introduced breadth requirement, expressing particular concern about its implications for the open curriculum. Nonetheless, the proposal managed to pass after being discussed across two faculty meetings.

The new policy is effective immediately starting with the graduates in the class of 2023, although all current students are also grandfathered into the old policy and will thus be evaluated under whichever policy would award them higher honors.

Under the new policy, eligibility for both summa and magna honors requires a student to first have satisfied the breadth requirement. The breadth requirement category that a given course counts toward is determined by the four-letter subject code in the course number, with every subject code except COLQ (Colloquium), FYSE (First-year Seminar), and INTE (Interdisciplinary) belonging to one category. If a course is cross-listed, its category designation is determined by the four-letter subject code that appears on the student’s transcript.

Courses taken pass/fail and passed can be counted toward the breadth requirement. Five College, study away, and transfer courses do not count toward the requirement.

Whether a student who meets the breadth requirement is awarded summa honors or magna honors then depends on the student’s final median grade and the departmental recommendation they receive for their honors thesis. A student’s median grade is the grade such that half of the student’s letter grades from Amherst and other Five College courses are above or equal to it, and half are below or equal to it. Double, triple, and quadruple courses are counted as two, three, and four courses, respectively, whereas half courses are excluded from this calculation.

A student is eligible for summa cum laude honors if they have a median grade higher than A- and receive a departmental recommendation of summa for their thesis. A student is eligible for magna cum laude honors if they have a median grade of A- and receive a departmental recommendation of summa, or if they have a median grade equal to or higher than A- and receive a departmental recommendation of magna.

All other students who complete an honors thesis and receive a departmental recommendation of any level of honors — in particular, students who do not meet the breadth requirement, have a median grade lower than A-, or receive a departmental recommendation of cum laude — are awarded cum laude honors.

The criterion for awarding English honors remains the same, with students becoming eligible for a degree with distinction if they have an overall GPA in the top 25 percent of their class.

Under the old policy, a student becomes eligible for summa cum laude honors if they receive a departmental recommendation of summa and have an overall GPA in the top 25 percent of their class. A student becomes eligible for magna cum laude honors if they receive a departmental recommendation of summa and have an overall GPA in the top 40 percent but not the top 25 percent of their class, or if they receive a departmental recommendation of magna and have a GPA in the top 25 percent of their class. All other students who receive a departmental recommendation of any level of honors are awarded cum laude honors.

The CEP’s discussions to change the policy began in the 2020-2021 academic year at the strong urging of student member Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22, said William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of the History of Art Nicola Courtright, who served on the CEP while it was crafting the new policy. The final proposal was the result of two years spent investigating the Latin honors systems at peer institutions, compiling relevant data on recent graduating classes, and considering a variety of possible alternatives, she added.

In developing the new policy, the committee primarily sought to address concerns that faculty and students had expressed over the years regarding the fairness of the GPA criterion.

“It seemed to us unfair that you needed an extremely high GPA to receive a summa or a magna for the year-long thesis work, which many of us on the committee felt was the laudable culmination of a student’s education at Amherst,” Courtright wrote to The Student.

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein, who serves as an ex officio member of the CEP, wrote to The Student that “[b]ecause so many students are tightly bunched in class rank, it seemed very arbitrary if someone was going to be in the top 25% or only in the top 26%--but that would make the difference between summa and magna, for example.”

In its final proposal, the CEP maintained that the use of class rank “rewards risk-averse course selection, penalizes students who have had difficult semesters, and creates stress around final cutoff points.”

The use of median grade rather than GPA is designed to eliminate the uncertainty and arbitrariness of class rank by relying instead of a fixed grade criterion. As the median grade is much less impacted by low outliers than GPA is, the new criterion is also far more forgiving, allowing students to still qualify for high honors even if they’ve received a number of lower grades from exploring unfamiliar subjects or having a couple rough semesters.

Indeed, according to the CEP’s proposal, nearly 40 percent of all May graduates in the classes of 2017 to 2021 had a median grade higher than A- (the requirement for summa honors), and nearly 75 percent of these graduates had a median grade equal to or higher than A- (the requirement for magna honors).

Furthermore, while only 39.1 percent of the graduates who had been recommended magna by their department were actually able to keep that designation (with the rest dropping to cum laude), 94.3 percent of these candidates would have been awarded magna cum laude honors had the new median grade criterion been applied. The percentage of summa-recommended students receiving summa cum laude honors also would have increased, from 80.2 percent to 89.6 percent.

Epstein noted to The Student that a major concern for the committee is that the new grade criterion provides less of a check on departments making high numbers of summa and magna recommendations. “Some might argue that the value of the summa and magna will be reduced, since it is likely that (many) more students will receive those levels of Latin honors,” she wrote.

While less selective than the class rank criterion, the median grade criterion nonetheless preserves a college-wide achievement component to the designation of Latin honors, which the CEP felt was important since Latin honors are ultimately awarded by the college and not by individual departments, Epstein wrote.

The newly introduced breadth requirement is also motivated by the idea that Latin honors should reflect the college’s evaluation of a student’s accomplishment. “[T]he College’s definition of excellence in coursework, and hence summa or magna honors, includes the willingness to explore unfamiliar intellectual and/or creative fields,” the CEP wrote in its proposal. “Regarding the proposed breadth criterion, we believe that it should be a modest but still meaningful requirement, to ensure that students the College declares worthy of high honors are indeed living up to the liberal arts ideal of exploring the curriculum beyond their own fields of expertise.”

According to the proposal, only 51 percent of all students and 57 percent of all honors candidates in the May graduating classes of 2017 to 2021 would have satisfied a breadth requirement similar to the one that was passed. (As the data was collected early in the CEP’s discussions, the categorization of subject codes differed slightly from the final version.) Arts was the most commonly lacking category, with 38 percent of all graduates taking less than one full course or two half courses in the arts.

“This decision [to add a breadth requirement] acknowledges that we faculty sense that we are not doing as good a job at advising as we might, because even though we make great cases for students to take a variety of subjects in fascinating fields, students shy away from certain areas that we believe our excellent colleagues teach very very well,” wrote Courtright, who noted that the CEP discussed the requirement at length given the long-standing tradition of the open curriculum.

She added that the CEP decided to count courses taken pass/fail toward the requirement in order to make it less burdensome for students who “really feared” one of the disciplinary categories.

The breadth requirement was particularly contentious among the faculty, who discussed the CEP’s proposal at the faculty meetings held on Dec. 6 and Feb. 7.

Some faculty members expressed concern that the breadth requirement was a threat to the college’s open curriculum and may start a larger shift toward the implementation of distribution requirements across the college.

At the Dec. 6 meeting, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat proposed an amendment to drop the breadth requirement and determine eligibility for honors solely based on the median grade criterion. The amendment failed by a vote of 46-75.

Other objections to the breadth requirement included concerns about the difficulty of scheduling courses to meet the requirement, as well as about the restrictions on courses that count toward the requirement.

“If a student only decides to write a thesis late in their junior year, without having previously considered this possibility, scheduling courses in their last year to satisfy this breadth requirement may be difficult,” Assistant Professor of Computer Science Matteo Riondato wrote in a statement to The Student. He added that the exclusion of transfer and Five College courses from the requirement disadvantages transfer students and students who want to study subjects not offered at Amherst, such as some foreign languages and musical instruments.

At the Feb. 7 meeting, Riondato advocated for an amendment to the breadth requirement that would reduce the requirement to at least one course in three out of four of the categories. Robert Benedetto, the William J. Walker professor of mathematics and chair of the CEP, noted that the CEP found this to be essentially the same as not having a breadth requirement at all. He also explained that non-Amherst courses were excluded due to the difficulty that would come with categorizing them. The amendment failed by voice vote.

Faculty also raised concerns about whether the arts departments are sufficiently resourced to handle the influx of demand that would come from instituting the breadth requirement. Epstein confirmed at the Feb. 7 meeting that there are indeed enough available slots in arts classes to support the new requirement.

The categorization of departments under the requirement was another point of contention. Christopher van den Berg, the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ’55 professor in classical studies, argued that language courses are too unlike the other humanities to be categorized with the humanities and also expressed concern that the new policy would formalize divisions between disciplines.

At the Feb. 7 meeting, Associate Professor of American Studies Robert Hayashi urged the faculty not to focus too much on the possible negative consequences of the policy, advocating for the breadth requirement as a way to encourage academic risk-taking and exposure to new perspectives at a school where students often “burrow into” their majors and disciplines.

Benedetto also acknowledged that the new policy had its imperfections, but likewise called on the faculty to “not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.”

While the faculty ran out of time to vote on the proposal at the Dec. 6 meeting, the proposal passed 68-48 at the end of the meeting on Feb. 7.

“The discussion made clear to me that the faculty remain committed to the open curriculum, and are also seeking a way to encourage more students to take advantage of what it offers — a chance to study widely in a variety of disciplines and methods,” President Michael Elliott wrote in a statement to The Student. “The resulting policy is an attempt to find a balance between those priorities, and the new course requirements for Latin honors constitute a very modest change.”

“The College faculty continually evaluate the curriculum and the policies of the College, and the administration will work with them to observe the effects of this policy change over time as part of the work of faculty governance,” he added.