Information for Faculty

Any full-time or part-time faculty can offer their course as Honors to selected students in their regular courses. If your student successfully completes your course as honors, an indication of "Honors" will be added to their transcript for your course. Students who complete 5 honors courses and meet other Honors Program requirements are eligible for transfer agreements with many colleges including UCLA, UCI and many other public and private colleges. Agreeing to offer your regular course as honors is entirely optional.

Any faculty can offer their course as Honors in two different ways:

1. You can offer Honors courses by getting CERTIFIED as an Honors Instructor and have an organized Embedded Honors Component in your regular courses - you will get a separate Honors Canvas shell set up with typical generic honors assignments ready for your use, which you can edit and reuse from semester to semester. This option is perfect if you plan to mentor multiple students on a regular basis. The certification usually takes only about 3 hours and you would get paid a one-time stipend for that time. 
2. You can create a contract with each Honors student individually for any regular course you teach, have the student submit the Contract to the Honors Program, and have the Honors coordinator approve it. No certification is required for this option. This option is perfect if you plan to mentor a single student once in a while, or just want to try mentoring an Honors student for the first time and see if you want to become an Honors Instructor. Unfortunately, you cannot get paid for working on contracts.  

Bellow you will find more details on each of the two ways to offer your courses as Honors. 

Becoming a Certified Honors Instructor

Why would you want to become an Honors Certified Instructor?   

• You will get a Ready to Go Model Honors Canvas Course, all set up with typical honors assignments, which you can start using for your honors students right away. All you would need to do is choose the assignments and adjust the due dates for your liking (and you can keep adding material as you teach). Having one Canvas Course for all your honors students will not only make it easier to provide the honors material for multiple students at once and to keep the students on track, but also prevent plagiarism and AI usage (which is on a rise even among honors students), because when you accept honors projects in emails the projects don’t go through any checks. If you already have a Canvas course for your Honors students or have Honors Assignments embedded in your regular courses, that’s great - all you will need to do is have it aligned and approved to become a “Certified” Canvas Course.  
• You will have a much greater autonomy to choose your own way of providing honors credit:
  • You will be able to control everything, from the due dates to the types of honors assignments - you will not need my approvals of your students’ proposals for projects.
  • You will be able to offer the honors option for your summer courses.
  • You might not even have the students write any proposals or do the projects at all! Instead, you could build a set of honors level extra assignments - such model might work better for math or computer science classes, where having one big project might be an issue.  
• You will get paid for getting your first Honors Canvas Course certified! The stipend will be equivalent to 3 hours of F-Hour rate (the current rate being $62.95 an hour).  
• Certified Honors instructors with experience will have a chance to teach a whole stand-alone Honors course with a smaller class size in the future!

What exactly would you need to do to get certified? 

• Complete a short honors instructor orientation online or in person (schedule TBA) or have a short one-on-one meeting with the Honors Program Coordinator (only once). 
• Have the Honors Program Coordinator review your Honors Canvas course/assignments after you personalized and finalized the Model Canvas Course to your liking (for each Canvas Course separately, if more than one).  

That is all! However, keep in mind - Honors Program budget is limited, so the certification will take place on a first come first serve basis. If you are interested - please click on the following link to complete a very short form to start the process:  

Sign up for Honors Canvas Course and to get certified!

If you are not ready, you can continue offering honors credit through contracts. You can find all the information about Contracts bellow.

Mentoring a Student Based on a Contract

No certification is necessary for this option, everyone can do it.

Any part-time or full-time faculty member is eligible to create an honors contract with an individual student in any regular course. An honors contract allows a student to go in-depth in an area of research related to your course. Any transfer-level course is eligible for an honors contract. 

STEP 1: Creating a Contract with Your Honors Student

As a mentor for an honors student, your first job will be to work with your honors student to create an Honors Contract, which must be submitted to the Honors Program by the end of the third week of instructions for approval by the Program.

It is the student responsibility to create the Contract, all  you need is to give feedback and approve it before the student submits it to the Program. The contract should indicate the nature of the honors project that a student will have to complete to earn the "honors" for your course as well as a schedule of one-on-one meetings (at least 4 are required). Honors projects can take the form of any thing from a research project, to an experimental design and write-up, to the creation of work of art with a narrative describing how that art fits within the theory and practice of your discipline. 

STEP 2: The Student Submits the Contract to the Honors Program

Your approval of the student contract is necessary but is not enough. The contract must be officially submitted and approved by the Honors program for the student to start working on the Honors project. You should receive a notification of the approval after your student submits it on time (see due dates on the right sidebar). If you do not receive any notifications, please check your junk folder, or email the Program coordinator, but you should not be working with the student if you have not received an approval notification. 

STEP 3: The Student Works and Meets with You Regularly Throughout the Semester

An honors contract is not just an agreement to additional work that a student will complete and submit to you at the end of the term. It is also an agreement that you will mentor and provide feedback to that student throughout the semester. You should be checking-in with the student at least every 2-3 weeks to provide feedback and advice, and to ensure that their project is progressing. For this reason the contract also requires that the student's project be broken up into several sub-steps with individual dates for completion. For example, a written research project might have separate dates where you evaluate the students research, notes, first half of the essay, second half of the essay, complete rough draft, and final draft. 

STEP 4: The Student Submits the Completed work to the Honors Program for Approval

Once the student completes the project at the end of the semester and you approve it, the student should submit the completed work to the Program for the Honors Program approval before the due date (usually the last day of instructions for the term). Once the student submits it - you should receive an email asking you to verify if the student indeed completed the work to your satisfaction. Once you verify the work and the work is also approved by the Honors Program - the student will receive "Honors" designation for your course on their transcript. If there are any issues with the approval you will receive a follow up email from the program.

If a student fails to complete the project, there is no penalty. The student just doesn't submit any completion forms.

A student must receive an "A" or "B" in the course for the honors designation to be added for this option.

Compensation for Mentoring Students

Unfortunately, due to the growth of the Program, processing and paying for each individual contract has become logistically and fiscally impossible. The only monetary compensation is available for a one-time Honors Faculty certification (see Certification information above). The hope is that the certification will make it easier for the faculty to mentor students without spending time outside of their office hours. We hope to develop non-monetary incentives to reward and acknowledging the hard work of faculty mentors who continue to mentor multiple students. If you have ideas on how to reward and honor instructors who mentor honors students, please contact the Program Coordinator.

Due Dates for Contracts

Honors Contracts are usually due at the end of the third full week of classes, or first week in summer. All completed work/reports/outcomes of Honors work are due on the last day of instruction before finals begin. Specific dates for this semester can be found on the right sidebar.

Frequently Asked Questions

Students in my class already complete a big and difficult project. Can I just add 5 pages to that project and have that count as an honors project? 

No. Our transfer institutions are clear that any project that counts for honors has to be made entirely of work not already already required for regular students enrolled in the course. These institutions evaluate our contracts for compliance. It is probably best to create the project separate from any existing course projects. If the project overlaps with an existing project in your course, the student will be asked in their contract to explicitly specify which aspects of the project are already required and which belong to the honors project. For example, an existing 10 page research paper would need to be expanded to 22 pages with additional expectations, and research elements not already contained in the project. Generally, creating a second companion project, rather than increasing the length of complexity of an existing project, tends to work better for the honors program.

How often do I need to meet with my honors student?

The program has an expectation that a student interact with their mentor at least every 2-3 weeks. These interactions can be in a traditional face-to-face meeting, via Zoom, email, or whatever platform makes the most sense in your situation.

What are my responsibilities vs. the student's responsibilities?

Mentors will:

• Help set the parameters of the student's contract
• Provide feedback to the student every 2-3 weeks
• Approve the completed project
• Reply to honors coordinator's email inquiry to confirm the project is completed

The student must:

• Submit the honors contract form to the Honors Program
• Complete the work on the schedule you two have determined
• Revise and amend their work based on your supervision
• Submit the honors work completion report to the Honors Program

Why would I want to mentor an honors project?

Many faculty find that mentoring honors students is the most rewarding part of their year. Honors students are generally excited to learn and responsive to feedback. They are generally self-motivated and intellectually curious, and they often end up becoming majors in the discipline where they complete their honors projects. These projects help students build valuable skills for advanced university work, and completing the program provides access to transfer agreement with many selective colleges.

Thank you for your interest in the Honors Transfer Program and feel free to contact the Honors Transfer Program coordinator with any further questions.

Can students work on an Honors project in pairs/groups?

They can, but the scope of the project would be bigger (doubled for pairs and even more for groups). It's important that each student gets to participate in each step/task (so that each of them learns each skill). It's just really important we make sure all honors students actually learn all of the "honors" skills. For example, sometimes one of the students takes on all the writing, because they are better at it, and the other student takes on something else, and that is not the best for them. If writing is one of the learning outcomes for the course then each student needs to learn how to write, so if one student is better at writing, then they should help the other student/s and/or edit their work, but the other student still needs to learn how to write and has to write at least some part of the paper (if it's a paper). Of course, it depends on the discipline and the skills you deem important for the honors students to learn in your class.

As some examples, you can ask the students to add a page where they would describe in detail each of their individual contributions to the work - if they submit one report together (same report for both of them). Or they can do a project together (collect the data together) but then have each submit a separate paper of their own as a report in their own words, with their own sources, interpretations, analysis.