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What Is An Honors Student? A Noel-Levitz Survey, Donald Kaczvinsky

Donald Kaczvinsky

In an impressive article published in the 2005 summer issue of JNCHC, Cheryl Achterberg laments the lack of empirical data available to provide a workable definition for honors students. While she duly notes that there is an “ideology” that honors students are “superior” to other students in an institution or of “high ability” or “the best and brightest,” she laments that “[t]here are few characteristics of honors students that can be standardized, measured, or uniformly compared across institutions” (Achterberg 75). She concludes her article with these considerations: honors students are “not a homogeneous group with a set of absolute or …