Like most honors programs and colleges nationally, Penn State does not have enough honors courses across the curriculum (especially in the upper division) for students to meet their honors credit requirements solely with honors courses and the eventual honors thesis. A successful honors option should give the student a significantly enriched experience for part of the course, sufficient to justify an honors transcript notation and satisfaction of requirements.

There are many worthwhile forms of enrichment, and several possibilities are suggested in our discussion of honors courses above. We specifically don't want honors options to “pile on” the same sort of work, e.g. longer problem sets or essays but with the same content or prompt.

In the past we also insisted that honors options should remove some part of the syllabus-prescribed graded work in order to add a corresponding amount of enriched work. While the preferred honors option model removes some part of the syllabus-prescribed graded work in order to add a corresponding amount of enriched work, we also permit enriched work to be additional rather than substituted for regular work. However, in all cases without exception (a) the enriched work must count for between 10 and 25% of the course grade, and (b) the total grading rubric must equal 100%. In other words, if the enriched work is additional, the other work must be pro-rated down to 75 to 90% of the course grade according to the percentage assigned to the enriched work.

All courses are nominally eligible for the honors option, however, in practice some courses are not a good fit such as lower-level world language, math or science below Penn State's standard first-semester placement, etc. While there is no policy against honors options in courses where an actual honors version is available at the campus, it's probably a good idea to decline those requests unless there are special circumstances.

While it is legitimate for a student to propose an honors option in something outside their major, whether general education or purely elective, you are certainly entitled to inquire about their genuine interest in enrichment in the course. There is always some element of necessity (fulfillment of requirements) in student requests for honors options, but some genuine degree of enrichment interest is necessary to justify your extra work as an instructor.

The only instructors who may not offer honors options by college policy are graduate students and adjuncts — this is to protect them from exploitation as people who are paid by the course (and who, in the case of grad students, are primarily here for something else.) We will consider exceptions to the rule for adjuncts if they have the support of their department, as expressed by the lead honors adviser to the Schreyer Honors College associate dean for academic affairs. Teaching faculty may offer honors options on the same basis as tenure-line faculty, unless their department specifies otherwise. If you are teaching faculty, please make sure the proposed honors option is consistent with your time and resource constraints — for instance, the student shouldn't propose to do work in your lab if you don't have one!

Students must propose the honors option via the college's Student Records System, but they shouldn't submit that before discussion with the faculty member. Once submitted—which should be by the end of the third week of the semester—the instructor will receive an automated email prompt to review the proposal. You may approve it, return it for revisions, or reject it, but that last option should only be if the student submitted without consultation with you, or if they submitted against your wishes. Once approved, whether initially or after revisions, the proposal goes to the student's honors adviser for review; while this is usually pro-forma, the honors adviser is our agent and is expected to return proposals for revision by the student if they don't meet the standards described here, or if they lack sufficient detail. Our office also does a cursory review of all proposals to make sure they have sufficient detail, since the honors option is a contract for specific work.

The proposal should be clear about the expected work product and when it's due — which should be no later than the last day of classes for the semester. Assuming the work is completed satisfactorily, you enter the course grade in the usual way in LionPath (taking into account the percentage assigned to the enriched work in the proposal, and our overall policies above). There will be no special notation in LionPath that the student is doing an honors option, so it's up to you to remember although our office will send a reminder late in the semester.

Students sometimes want to cancel (rescind) an honors option, and they can do so by doing a petition in our Student Records System prior to the last day of classes. While they don't need your permission as the instructor to do that, they should certainly consult with you first. This is especially true if they proposed substitute work, since if the enriched work isn't completed, they will need your approval to revert to the usual work.

Enriched work done poorly (or even not at all) impacts that percentage of the course grade assigned to it (from 10 to 25%), but the course will still get the honors notation. A student might therefore drop from A to B for the course, get the honors notation, while totally failing to complete the enriched work. While this is rare, we encourage you to build incremental deadlines into the proposal, or to have the enriched work due early enough that any deficiencies can be addressed.