June 9, 2004
by Jonathan Dine

New honors system failure on three fronts
For those of you who don’t know me, I am an unabashed JDS fan. I love this school’s commitment to pluralism, its wonderful Judaic studies and its strong general studies.

When I was visiting the school as a prospective student, one of the things which impressed me most was the honors program.

The teachers of honors classes taught their subjects at a wonderfully detailed and high level. The discussions were thoughtful and delved into the subjects at depths unequaled by any school I had or have since seen.

This past year, the school decided to change the honors system into two tracks —honors and honors seminar. This experiment, meant partly to allow more students into honors-level classes, has proven to be a step backward, not an improvement.It has failed for three reasons: content, class size and teaching ability.

If honors seminar classes are truly to be the top classes comprising the brightest and most passionate students, this difference should be seen in the classes’ content.Yet, in my experience, there has been little difference in content between the honors seminar classes and the honors classes in the same subject. In honors seminar, I was given the same tests, same homework assignments, same readings and even same review sheets as the honors class. The only difference seemed to be that we were graded more harshly than the honors class.

For there to be true separation between the honors and honors seminar levels, this cannot continue. Honors seminar should be given more difficult readings, harder tests, harder homework, etc.

The second problem involves the class sizes of both the honors and college-prep classes. Before this year, honors classes were small and therefore very conducive to in-depth discussions and lectures. Now, there are honors classes with over 20 students while the college-prep classes have sometimes fewer than ten students. The honors classes should be the ones with fewer students in order to foster more discussion and less general lecturing and digestion of the material. By having more students in the honors classes, the classes have become more focused on general lecturing rather than on those wonderful in-depth discussions.

The issue of the faculty and the honors system brings up a third problem with the honors system this year. Throughout the year, it seemed that some of the teachers of the honors seminar courses were not sure what to expect from their students. They tried to bypass this problem by giving the same content to honors and honors seminar classes, while grading honors seminar students harder.

They did not and still do not seem to understand what level of work the honors seminar, and even sometimes the honors students, can handle. For the current honors system to work, the faculty must know how to teach these classes and what to expect from the students.

The honors system can still work. These problems obviously stem from the fact that this is the first year of the new honors system. However, if these problems are not addressed, I fear that the honors classes that I remember and experienced will be only memories.