What Does Graduating With Honours Mean?<\/span><\/h2>\nAre graduating means that you have met all of the school’s requirements for general education and a significant area of concentration and will receive a college diploma. That is an extraordinary accomplishment considering only about 36 percent of the U.S. population holds a four-year college degree.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nStudents who are in the upper percentile of their classes-as delineated by each school-graduate with honors. Each of the schools establishes criteria for choosing a reward. Graduating with honors typically means that the students received Latin honors the cum laude. Latin honors are nationally recognized symbols of undergraduate excellence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPercentage Of Students Graduate With Honours? And Does It Matter?<\/span><\/h2>\nAgain, only the top 30% of the graduating classes in most universities graduate with honors, so that’s not a lot, but still enough that even the summa cum laude graduates have a very hard time finding employment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe truth is that despite the prestige that Latin honors can confer on a student, this special consideration only works for two years, according to researchers from the University of Illinois.<\/span><\/p>\nIn their study, researchers did found that, while obtaining a Latin honor will do act as a form of investment once all the student takes their place in the labor force, the returns are very moderate and, frankly, short-lived, with around most of the students graduating with the honors seeing no extra raise to their own salary three years after being employed.<\/span><\/p>\nSure, getting the Latin honors is very significant for securing a great job; it does not promise nor even guarantee that you will get a rise at the job, nor does it help decide whether or not you will move up the corporate ladder.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat is worse: these short-lived moderate benefits only really affect graduates from the Ivy League schools, so for a while, you might be a very Summa Cum Laude from your own local community college, a cum laude will graduate from, say, Columbia will always probably get that job before you will do.<\/span><\/p>\nSome critics claim that the Latin honors have system discourages what the college is all about: exploring free academic thinking. Critics claim that the grade-conscious students will chase down the Latin honors just for its sake, forgoing all of the other rich experiences that they might have in college like taking the electives, learning a new subject, and, yes, attending those of the legendary keggers at the Sigma Phi.<\/span><\/p>\nHow Do You Graduate With Honours?<\/span><\/h2>\nAgain, there’s no one national standard for the student to qualify for graduation with honors; schools often have the free rein to decide the requirements for graduation with honors and can include anything just from the highest possible GPA to an extracurricular achievements.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn general, however, most of the colleges and universities set their GPA requirements as follows: 3.5, which is for the cum laude, 3.7 for Magna Cum Laude, and around 4.0 for Summa Cum Lauda. But, again, certain schools will always have different requirements: the University of Pennsylvania, for example, does require a 3.9. Harvard, meanwhile, requires a minimum of 3.6 GPA for a student to get the cum laude, with just nothing short of a solid 4.0 for a summa cum laude.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOn the other hand, some universities might not use GPAs at all. For example, NYU rewards you the cum laude honors to the top 15% of all graduates. The top 10% get the magna cum laude honors at the top 5%, given the summa cum laude honor. Northwestern University follows a very similar system. The top 12% gets the cum laude, the top 8% gets the Magna, and the top 5% gets the summa.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAlong with their GPAs, many of the universities will also be able to require the students to secure other achievements that can easily range from getting a faculty of recommendation, completing a certain number of the advanced course units, presenting a paper at the conference, and\/or completing an honors thesis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMost schools can also disqualify students for graduating with honors if they have infractions on their records, academic or disciplinary. The slightest infraction can disqualify a student even if their GPA is 4.0, so bad students should be beware.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut some of the schools might not will offer Latin honors at all, even a university as the prestigious as Stanford University, which will foregoes the traditional Latin honors system and to instead translates it to the plain English: the top 15% of the students in terms of the GPA ae awarded a Bachelor’s Degree with the Distinction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo it will works kind of the same way as the Latin honors, except it’s actually in English, and there’s just only one Distinction to recognize.<\/span><\/p>\n