Welcome to 2008! I hope you all enjoyed your Christmas break and are enjoying your first week back at school/work (unless you're one of the lucky ones who has this whole week off... that's nice!). As I've mentioned, our Liberal Arts Honors Program/merit scholarship awards were mailed out last Friday, December 28. Let's talk a little bit about what we were looking for in the students we selected for the Honors Program...

As I'm sure you've gathered from my last few postings, the Early Action applicant pool was incredibly strong academically, with the average INVITED STUDENT GPA at an "A-minus" (unweighted) in a strong (Honors/AP level) high school curriculum (that's not to the Honors Program - that is the average performance of a student accepted to the college). Therefore, you'd be correct in assuming that the students selected for the Honors Program are at the very top of both our applicant pool and their high school classes. While the admission process is very competitive (with under 1,000 spaces in our freshman class), remember that there are only 125 spots in our Liberal Arts Honors Program, so we are obviously talking about the very best of a very strong group of academic performers.

On average, the students selected for the Honors Program excelled throughout high school, earning a straight-A average across the board in the most demanding curriculum offered at their high schools. These students have taken the highest level courses offered (IB, college-credit level, AP, Honors/Advanced) in all core academic subject areas and achieved grades that place them at the top of their classes. Let's talk about "exhausting" the high school curriculum for a minute...

Generally speaking, most of the students we accept to the college (not to the Honors Program) have taken four years of the five core subjects (English, Math, Natural Science, Social Science, Foreign Language) and have taken a predominantly Honors-level curriculum throughout high school. But we are only selecting a very small number of these students into the Honors Program. And they are the students who have taken on THE HIGHEST ACADEMIC CHALLENGE IN ALL SUBJECT AREAS. I know I am really hammering the point about curriculum here, but there is a enormous difference between a strong curriculum and THE STRONGEST curriculum available at a high school.

Also, please note that we are talking about an "unweighted" GPA of an "A" that these students have achieved... they have taken the most challenging classes offered at their high schools and earned "A's" in practically all of them. For students who attend high schools that compute class rank, the average rank for a student who was invited into the Honors Program was 3.27%.

As a test-optional institution, SATs/ACTs are not required for admission nor are they required to be considered for the Honors Program. If a student does submit his or her test scores, we will consider them in the Honors Program review after looking at the high school academic performance, and the average test scores for us this year for students invited into Liberal Arts Honors landed just below a 700 on all three sections of the SATs or about a 31 on the ACT. But please remember, one strong SAT/ACT score will never outweigh high school academic performance - so a student with strong (700) SAT scores but a "B-plus/A-minus" high school GPA will NOT be invited into the Honors Program simply based on the test scores. The review for the Liberal Arts Honors Program puts the majority of the weight on the student's high school academic performance (as does our admission process).

I hope that this information helps to clarify the selection process for our Liberal Arts Honors Program. If you have any questions about the Honors Program that I have not yet answered, please feel free to send them along. Until next time, Happy New Year!