student, etc. may serve on an Honors thesis committee: such exceptional cases require
that the department make a petition to be approved by the UHP Directors Committee.)
Committee members need not belong to the same program or college; in fact, in some
cases it will be beneficial to have committee members from diverse units present.
Each committee will have a chair, who will often be the primary advisor for the student
during research and writing, though students will sort out on a case-by-case basis with
whom they do this work, and how often they meet with them to discuss progress and to
go over drafts. The chair will determine when the thesis draft is at a final-enough state
that it can be circulated to the other committee members (i.e., the readers) for additional
evaluation. All committee members must sign off on the thesis itself and on any required
public presentation. Irreconcilable differences between committee members on the
quality of a student’s thesis will be referred to the UHP Faculty Advisory Board and the
UHP Directors Committee for a final ruling. Petitions by students to overturn the
judgment of their committee will likewise be referred to these committees. Rarely, and in
consultation with the UHP Directors Committee, a non-participatory or problematic
faculty member may be replaced on a student’s committee.
Thesis and level of Latin Honors. There are three instances in which a student’s thesis can
raise or lower the level of Latin Honors relative to the GPA band the student falls into.
CASE 1: A student with a summa eligible GPA either fails to, or opts not to complete the
requirements for a summa-level thesis, but still completes the thesis. In this case, the
student will graduate magna cum laude. CASE 2: The committee judges a student’s
thesis to be of poor, but passable, quality. In this case, a summa-eligible student may be
dropped to magna cum laude, and a magna-eligible student may be dropped to cum
laude. CASE 3: A student who is no more than 0.1 GPA points below any of the GPA
bands may be recommended by their thesis committee for the level of Honors just above
the GPA level if the student writes a truly exceptional thesis (see page 5, above). In all
cases, if a student fails to complete a thesis, or produces a thesis that the committee
deems falling below Honors-eligible quality, that student will be ineligible to graduate
with Latin Honors.
Plan A: Sole-authored Thesis. Students who select this option will write a thesis
comprising work clearly contextualized within the body of existing material relevant to
the student’s subject matter. That is, it must indicate an engaged awareness with the
existing work relevant to the student’s topic. Note that there is a wide variety of what this
work may look like across the University. It may involve analysis of pre-existing data
sets; it may include collaborative research work done as part of a team in a wet lab; it
may be done in conjunction with a faculty member’s ongoing research, and so forth.
While the thesis itself must represent the student’s own writing and thought, the process
of doing the research for the thesis need not be done in isolation.
Amount of work. The thesis will often (though not always) represent at least two
semesters’ worth of work (including conception of the idea, proposal, research, and
writing). In many cases, much more time will have gone into the formulation of the topic