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Assessing Success In Honors: Getting Beyond Graduation Rates, Sean K. Kelly

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

An honors curriculum with realistic graduation requirements should have a respectable graduation rate. This number, when low, can indicate significant problems in the program. But a high graduation rate does not necessarily indicate success. A quality honors program, especially one that remains attentive to students’ ability to thrive, might have better measures available for judging impact and effectiveness. After all, manipulating a graduation rate is easy: make the curriculum excessively convenient and lower standards. While some honors curricula are perhaps unnecessarily rigid or unusually difficult, the faculty and administrators of most quality programs have managed to create a curriculum with …

Factors Influencing Honors College Recruitment, Persistence, And Satisfaction At An Upper-Midwest Land Grant University, Timothy J. Nichols, Kuo-Liang Matt Chang

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Student success and the “completion agenda” are important issues in higher education today (Complete College America). For honors programs and colleges, understanding and advancing these issues requires data-driven approaches tailored to the unique honors student population and broader institutional contexts. Honors faculty and administrators hoping to succeed in their recruitment, retention, and graduation efforts need an accurate understanding of why students decide to enroll and persist as well as their satisfaction with honors experiences. Our research data provide particular insight into the student experience at South Dakota State University (SDSU) but may also be instructive to a broader audience of …

About The Authors 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Scott Carnicom is a professor of psychology and an associate dean of the honors college at Middle Tennessee State University. Since 2012, he has also served as a special assistant in the provost’s office helping with a variety of initiatives. In 2011–12, he served as an ACE Fellow at Kenyon College.

Contents

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dedication to Hallie Ellis …

Predicting Student Success, Ameliorating Risk, And Guarding Against Homogeneity In Honors, Scott Carnicom

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Jerry Herron’s thought-provoking essay raised three key issues in my mind that I hope to describe in this humble response to his fine work. The overarching theme of his essay was to inquire how honors administrators predict student success and how they use that predictive power wisely and objectively to admit students and maintain quality. I want to expand on this idea and point out that such algorithms ideally could also predict students at risk so that institutional personnel could mobilize support efforts more proactively. Additionally, Herron notes the honors community’s appropriate and unyielding focus on academic quality at a …

Improving Retention And Fit By Honing An Honors Admissions Model, Patricia Joanne Smith, John Thomas Vitus Zagurski

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

For over a century, admissions officers and enrollment managers have relied on external validation of merit in selective admission of undergraduates. A main criterion used for selection is standardized testing, i.e., the SAT and ACT. Since these tests have been long-suspected and then shown to contain class and race biases while not accurately predicting retention (Banerji), the Schedler Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) shifted to a holistic, multi-criterion selection process, de-emphasizing standardized tests, and then analyzed the outcomes. The statistical analysis served two goals. The first was to test whether variables in the admissions model, developed …

Signifying Difference: The Nontraditional Student And The Honors Program, Nancy Reichert

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In their essay “Nontraditional Honors,” Janice Rye Kinghorn and Whitney Womack Smith state that students who are “twenty-five-years of age and older are usually considered nontraditional.” However, they first acknowledge that “traditional” and “nontraditional” are “constructed and slippery terms.” One of the most important ways that we as faculty and staff can serve our students through an honors education is to deconstruct terms such as “traditional” and “nontraditional” in order to show the significant gaps between the signifiers and the signified and to expose the negative connotations of a construct that is defined as not being the other construct.

John Boswell: Posting Historical Landmarks At The Leading Edge Of The Culture Wars, Jeffery Cisneros

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One of the most enduring and controversial figures in the field of history is John E. Boswell. His work on homosexuality and the history of the Christian Church was published at a key time during the Stonewall Riots in the late 1960s and the removal of homosexuality from the list of diagnostic mental disorders in the mid 1970s. This social upheaval created a dynamic that not only influenced Boswell personally but contributed to the vehement reaction to his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. …

Nontraditional Honors And The Hopefulness Of Summer Reading, Angela M. Salas

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the summer of 2012, I had the good fortune to have my summer session course cancelled as a result of low enrollment. While unexpectedly losing a course and a salary was unpleasant, I undertook a reading program designed to help me improve our first-year honors classes. The sequence, Honors 103 and 104, is known as the Common Intellectual Experience (CIE), and it fulfills multiple general education requirements for all but our nursing students. In the course of the year, students read and respond to four texts (generally paired fiction and nonfiction works), prepare a guided, independent research project, give …

Undocumented In Honors, Kimberly Aramburo, Suketu Bhavsar

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the Kellogg Honors College at Cal Poly Pomona, I (SB) have encountered several high-achieving students who, after coming to trust me, have revealed themselves to me as undocumented. These students came to the United States as children through non-legal channels, generally brought by their families, who were searching for opportunities or for escape from dangerous, oppressive situations in their home countries. These students have recently become known as “Dreamers,” after the Dream Acts being debated in the highest levels of government in the United States. Often first-generation college students, they are usually economically disadvantaged.

About The Authors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Kimberly Aramburo is a Kellogg Honors College student at Cal Poly Pomona, where she is studying business administration. She hopes to attend law school and become a practicing criminal defense attorney in the future. She serves on the board of an undocumented support group on campus and hopes to make a difference for undocumented individuals.

The Confidence Game In Honors Admissions And Retention, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In “Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy,” Jerry Herron argues that “a well-conceived admissions policy tells us much more than whom to recruit; it becomes the basis for a quantitative defense of what we do with data and puts a convincing dollar value on the good evangel of excellence.” As a rhetorician who worked at an advertising agency in a previous life, I can certainly acknowledge the value of promoting a product, whether we are pitching our programs to prospective students or performing feats of statistical prestidigitation for upper administration. I am also, however, skeptical about administration’s increasing …

Mothers In Honors, Mimi Killinger, Rachel Binder-Hathaway, Paige Mitchell, Emily Patrick

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The University of Maine’s 2012 valedictorian, honors student Rachel Binder-Hathaway, gave her graduation speech via Skype last May as she had already begun a yearlong Fulbright Scholarship in Bangladesh. Rachel was putting to use her business and economics degrees, traveling to numerous villages in an effort to determine various best practices in microfinance while also isolating ineffective program elements. She intended to help Bangladeshi women grow their own successful small businesses and thus work their way out of relentless and abject poverty. Rachel is committed to assisting these women, who would otherwise have few opportunities outside the home, to create …

Nontraditional Honors, Janice Rye Kinghorn, Whitney Womack Smith

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

While honors programs and colleges often proclaim the importance of recruiting and retaining a diverse group of high-ability students, many are still exclusionary and predicated on assumptions about the student body that are no longer valid. In general, we assume that honors students matriculate straight from high school and, having no family obligations, are able to reside in honors living-learning communities, participate in co-curricular honors experiences, and take advantage of honors study abroad opportunities. The structure and programming of honors can thus prohibit the full participation of nontraditional students and compound the personal and psychological barriers that keep many talented, …

Dedication

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

With this issue we honor Deborah Sell Craig, longtime staff member at the Kent State University Honors College, who passed away in July surrounded by her family. Deborah received her BA in political science from Wittenberg and followed it with two master’s degrees (political science and education) and a PhD in educational evaluation and measurement from Kent State University. Her 1987 dissertation, “Predicting Success in an Honors Program: A Comparative Multiple and Ridge Regression,” was an early example of honors research. Her 1981 annotated bibliography of “The Honors Movement in the United States” in Forum for Honors and her subsequent …

Contents 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dedication to Deborah Sell Craig. . . . . . …

Nontraditional Honors Students

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The National Collegiate Honors Council is an association of faculty, students, and others interested in honors education. Executive Committee: Rick Scott, President, University of Central Arkansas; Jim Ruebel, President-Elect, Ball State University; Gregory Lanier, Immediate Past-President, University of West Florida; Barry Falk, Vice-President, James Madison University; Kyoko Amano, Secretary, University of Indianapolis; Gary Bell, Treasurer, Texas Tech University. Executive Director: Cynthia M. Hill, headquartered at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Board of Directors: Suketu Bhavsar, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Lisa Coleman, Southeastern Oklahoma State University; Riley Cook, University of Iowa; Emily Jones, Oklahoma State University; Joe King, Radford University; Jon Kotinek, …

An Honors Koan: Selling Water By The River, Jeffrey A. Portnoy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Since Jerry Herron begins his forum essay, “Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy,” with his anecdotal True Genealogical Confessions, I feel obligated to begin in a similar mode. One side of my family was in the real estate business in St. Louis, and the other operated on the production side of industry—garment manufacturing, in the schmatta business so to speak. Like Herron, I have benefitted from a familial confluence of disparate skill sets in my position as Director of the Georgia Perimeter College Honors Program, which during the recruiting and registration season I would liken to that of …

Ua64/2 The Challenge: Magazine For The Center For Gifted Studies (No. 30, Winter 2013), Center For Gifted Studies, Tracy Inman Editor

Gifted Studies Publications

No abstract provided.

Ua35/11 Honors Program, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Honors Program. Includes brochures, awards programs, student handbooks, newsletters and research publications.