Honors for graduates fall slightly since 2004

These statistics include regular honors, high honors and highest honors awardees.

While more than 40 percent of undergraduates graduated with honors last year, these numbers differed across departments, according to data collected by The Daily Princetonian from Mudd Library.

In some of the smaller departments, including music, astrophysics and Slavic languages — which had seven, two and one majors, respectively — all concentrators graduated with honors last year.

In other small departments, like East Asian Studies, which had 11 majors last year, and geosciences, which graduated four concentrators, the percentages were lower. Eighteen percent of East Asian studies majors graduated with honors in 2009, as did 25 percent of geosciences majors.

Astrophysics professor and undergraduate representative Neta Bahcall said these statistics were less meaningful for smaller departments, however.

“Because we are a small department ... it is difficult to see any trend,” she explained. “It is difficult to do such analysis for small departments like ours.”

For each of the four largest departments, the percentage of students receiving honors fell between these extremes.

In the Wilson School, which had 83 majors, 47 percent of seniors received honors, while 38 percent of the 112 politics majors did. Thirty-three percent of the 120 economics majors graduated with honors in 2009, compared to only 30 percent in the 94-student history department.

One reason for these discrepancies is that departments determine honors according to different systems.

For example, while the economics and sociology departments both base their numbers on student performance and average number of honors given to seniors in the past, they weight the metrics differently, department representatives said.

The economics department gives weights to grade components for departmental coursework, independent work, and senior comprehensive exams to arrive at an “honors index” on a scale from one to 10, acting department chair Gene Grossman said. He explained that the department weighs grades received for courses, independent work and the senior comprehensive exam and translates the data into a number out of 10.

“What we try to accomplish at the meeting is to find natural breaking points in the index series with relatively large gaps between those who receive one type of honors and another,” Grossman said, adding, “If students’ scores bunch together, we don’t want to draw an arbitrary line between them.”

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The sociology department usually awards honors to roughly one- third of its concentrators, sociology department representative Mitchell Duneier said in an e-mail.

“This is not a quota and it could go higher, but generally conforms to our subjective sense of the quality of work,” Duneier said. “I cannot recall ever receiving a complaint from a sociology concentrator who felt the department had been too stingy with its honors.”

One reason the fraction of economics seniors receiving honors has not shrunk in the five years that grade deflation has been in effect is that the department aims to award honors to about as many students as it did in the previous year, Grossman said.

“My sense of how [the honors policy of the economics department] works is that we are shooting for a roughly constant fraction,” Grossman said, adding that around one-third of seniors have received some kind of graduation honors since 2005.

Grossman said that the change in attitude brought about by the shifting grading policy, not the policy itself, might be affecting his colleagues in the economics department. He said that the frequent discussion of grade deflation on campus may have “led faculty to think more about having the honors mean something that is consistent over time.”

“All I’m suggesting is that if discussion of grade inflation is in the air, it might affect how my colleagues think about honors,” he said.