Honors Baccalaureate Degree

By junior year, each thesis student is required to:

• Have taken HNRS 485 or HNRS 486 Honors Academic Research (3 credit hours). HNRS 485 is designed to provide general guidance for narrowing areas of interest toward selection of a topic for an independent project or thesis as well as strategies for approaching and securing an appropriate faculty mentor or thesis supervisor. HNRS 486 engages students in collaborative research.
• Attend an informational meeting at the Cohen Honors College that is geared to providing information about the thesis process, including important deadlines and relevant general policies regarding Honors theses. The informational meeting offers the means to encourage as well as assess each student’s progress in planning, proposing, and coordinating viable thesis projects.
• Talk with faculty about your ideas for a thesis topic.

By the beginning of your senior year, each thesis student is required to:

• Have secured an established scholar/practitioner in their field to serve as thesis supervisor, identified a topic for the thesis, and formulated a topic for research or theme for creative production. Students should work closely with their supervisor to narrow the scope of the endeavor to arrive at a project that meets the supervisor’s disciplinary standards and reflects the student’s individual scholarly/creative interests.
• Complete and submit an honors thesis intent form by September 1st or March 1st, the beginning of your senior year. The form asks students to list a working title for their thesis, provide a description of the project and provide the name, departmental affiliation, contact information and signature of their thesis supervisor. The honors thesis form offers the means to assess each student’s progress in coordinating the thesis project, determining its objectives and organizing appropriate mentorship for the thesis.
• Visit the Honors Forms page to find the thesis intent form and thesis submission form.

To be completed during senior year:

• Ensure the Cohen Honors College has enrolled you in HNRS 491 for the correct semester, the correct number of credits, and with the correct instructor of record. You will need to repeat this step if you split your credits between semesters. Honors Baccalaureate students must register for 3 credits total of HNRS 491 Honors Thesis to complete requirements for the H.B. degree.
• Arrange regular consultations with your thesis supervisor to develop the senior thesis from the initial proposal to its final presentation.

Student and faculty may find the sample HNRS 491 Honors thesis syllabus useful for planning and evaluation.

To be completed during senior year:

• By March 30 or October 30 of the semester in which you plan to graduate, submit a complete draft of your thesis to your thesis supervisor. See the Honors thesis guide (PDF) for assitance.
• By December 1 or May 1 in the final semester of the student’s senior year, all elements of the thesis project must be submitted to the Honors Dean’s Office by the thesis supervisor accompanied by the completed and signed Honors Thesis Submission form.
• All work submitted as a thesis project must be accompanied by the cover sheet signed by the student, the supervisor and, if required by the thesis supervisor, additional faculty advisors. The thesis cover sheet provides written certification from the supervisor stating that the thesis meets the standards and expectations established by the supervisor and agreed upon by the student.
• Depending on the thesis topic, the student may be required by the thesis supervisor to submit the thesis for review by additional faculty advisors prior to Dean’s Office submission. The thesis supervisor also may choose to require a formal defense or presentation.
• The Honors Dean’s Office submits the final certification to the Registrar’s Office by December 10 or May 10 in the final semester of the student’s senior year.

Please consider also signing the approval form allowing the Cohen Honors College to publish your thesis on its web page and to the SOAR Project of the WSU Libraries. Your thesis supervisor also will have to sign to approve this submission to the library archives.

The supervisor and/or thesis reviewer may award any one of the following:

• Pass with Distinction: The thesis exceeds expectations. A thesis passed with distinction qualifies for publication on the website and SOAR.
• Pass: The thesis meets expectations. A thesis passed will be considered for publication on the website and SOAR.
• Pass with Revisions: The thesis does not meet expectations but the basic hypothesis and data are sufficient in quality and quantity to recommend minor revisions. To complete requirements for the Honors Baccalaureate, the student must revise a thesis awarded passed with revisions by any reviewer and resubmit for review by the faculty thesis supervisor by the current semester deadline.
• Fail: Student has not completed written or creative assignments and the thesis contains significant flaws. At the discretion of the faculty thesis supervisor, the student whose thesis is awarded a fail by any reviewer may revise the thesis and resubmit for consideration in the next semester.

Some Pitfalls for Thesis Supervisors to Avoid:

Although every discipline has different ways of approaching and evaluating Honors Theses, some problems arise across disciplines that could be avoided with a little foresight.

1) Don’t let the student take on too broad or difficult of a topic. Although it is important that the student’s excitement for the questions be encouraged, they will not necessarily know what is possible to accomplish in a single year. The burden for that decision rests largely on the readers at the time of the prospectus. Ideally, the work for an Honors Thesis is roughly equivalent to the work for two three-hour courses, but the vast majority of students spend a great deal more time on their projects. The majority of students who don't pursue or complete the Honors Thesis do so because they simply do not have sufficient time for the project they began.

2) Don’t let the student take up too much of your time. We don’t want your first experience with an Honors Thesis to be your last. Discuss frankly with the student what your expectations and constraints are and make sure that he/she is aware of other resources available for writing support on campus. We do not expect a Second Reader to be heavily involved until the defensible version, although individual readers vary in their commitments.

3) Be clear about deadlines, and the order in which work must be accomplished. The Thesis Advisor may set any intermediate deadlines for work that seems appropriate, and students are often helped by having set dates for the completion of the various steps. If it is important to the Thesis Advisor, for example, that the student complete a literature review before beginning research, the student needs to know this and needs to know how that changes the project timeline.

4) Don’t lose contact with the student. There’s no other way of making sure that progress is being made toward the thesis. At the beginning of the process, deadlines for reaching certain plateaus should be established and maintained. If the student is having difficulty, everyone will recognize that fact earlier if there’s a deadline. There will be less work for the faculty members and the student if there’s no last minute rush to finish the project.

5) Insist on an appropriate amount of originality from the student. In some situations, a literature overview is an appropriate project for an Honors Thesis, and it is very unlikely that any undergraduate student will accomplish truly ground-breaking work, but the purpose of the Honors Thesis is to encourage the student along that path. If the student is not designing his/her own research from the ground up, they should make a substantial contribution and should at least understand and be able to articulate why, for example, design decisions were made in the way that they were and what relevance these decisions have to the project as a whole.