Liberal Arts and Education Honors Program

The Honors Program Council, comprised of faculty from all colleges of the university, organizes and administers special liberal-education courses for undergraduates who have demonstrated high academic promise. The aim of this program is to provide superior students with opportunities to study the problems, ideas, and methods of the liberal arts with an intensity, depth, and multidisciplinary perspective that cannot usually be achieved in regular courses. By taking advantage of these opportunities, students can gain a number of important benefits:

the intellectual growth produced by working on challenging and extraordinary problems under the close supervision of good teachers, often collaborating in teams, and in cooperation with some of the best students in the university;
the gains in academic skills and se1f-confidence produced by having to meet the high academic standards of honors courses;
the prestige of graduating with a special honors designation; and
satisfying, through honors courses, some of the university's liberal-studies requirements for graduation.

The University Honors Program currently offers courses through the following two series: Freshman Honors Courses and Honors Colloquia.

Freshman Honors Courses: Recently, the Honors Program Council authorized the design of extraordinary courses in the liberal arts to meet the special intellectual needs of the most promising students in the entering freshmen class. Each of these freshmen seminars, which will contain no more than twenty students, is to be a section of an introductory course in the arts and sciences that an instructor has adapted to inspire, engage, and challenge students who show evidence of academic talent. In contrast with traditional sections of these introductory courses, the freshmen seminars allow students to satisfy many requirements of the General Education Program in small classes in which instructors provide abundant opportunities for class discussion, specialized tutorial instruction, reading in primary sources, and the writing of expository and analytical essays. Enrollment in these honors courses is by invitation only to entering freshmen who have achieved a score of at least 27 on the ACT (i.e., 95th percentile or better) or have graduated in the upper 15% of their high-school classes. Each May, the director of the University Honors Program invites qualified members of the incoming freshman class to submit applications for any of the freshman honors courses being offered the following fall semester. Working with the Registrar, the director enrolls successful applicants to the appropriate course prior to the first freshman registration of the summer.

Honors Colloquia: The courses in this new series, most of which involve multidisciplinary study, allow qualified students to study important problems, concepts, and themes of the arts and sciences under the supervision of teams of outstanding teachers drawn from those fields. Recent honors colloquia have included:

Arthur Then and Now: King Arthur in Literature, Drama, Film, Art, Music, Architecture, History, Geography, and Archaeology
Art and the Human Experience
Classics of Autobiography
Vietnam-Era America in Literature, History, Music and Film
The Epipsyche in Literature
The Origins of American Capitalism

To enroll in advanced honors colloquium, a student must maintain a high grade point average, have earned at least 18 college credits from UW-Platteville or other accredited institutions of higher education; and have received grades of B or better in all honors courses previously taken.

Students meeting these standards are invited by the director to apply for admission for upcoming colloquia. The director enrolls successful applicants to the appropriate prior to the registration period for all other students.

The director may waive the formal admission requirement for students who present credible evidence that their academic records fail to reflect their true capacity to benefit from honors work.