Harvard, Yale and Princeton are among the nation’s most selective universities, but when it comes to doling out Latin honors, Duke has them all beat.
The University’s simple yet stringent guidelines for Latin honors preserve their integrity, adequately award excellence across all disciplines and, importantly, allow for a separate emphasis on independent scholarship.
Primarily used by colleges and universities in the United States to award exemplary achievement throughout a student’s undergraduate career, the Latin honors system consists of three tiers: cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude corresponding to “with honor,” with great honor” and “with highest honor.”
Duke’s current system for granting Latin honors to undergraduates has been in place since an overhaul in 1996 by the Arts & Sciences Council. Previously, static GPA requirements determined a student’s level of honors, with a 3.4 GPA as the cutoff for cum laude.
Now, Latin honors are only awarded to a percentage of the class: the top 5 percent receive summa cum laude, the next 10 percent receive magna cum laude and the next 10 percent after that receive cum laude. The percentage cutoffs are determined using the GPAs of the previous year’s graduating class, with separate calculations for the Pratt School of Engineering and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.
Duke is relatively conservative in distributing Latin honors, but this is a good thing. Approximately 25 percent of Duke students graduate with some level of honors; that number is 30 percent at Yale, 41.5 percent at Princeton and nearly 50 percent at Harvard.
By keeping the number of honors recipients low, the University maintains the exclusivity of this award. And by using a system based on percentages instead of unchanging GPA cutoffs, it prevents grade inflation from diluting the significance of Latin honors.
Not only is the University’s honors system practical, it is also philosophically sound.
Latin honors should be awarded to students who excel across disciplines in all of their academic pursuits, while departmental distinction—granted by individual departments to those who complete an independent research project or senior thesis—should be awarded to students who have excelled in a particular field and have engaged in the creation of knowledge. These are complementary achievements, but the inherent difference requires separate consideration.
Unlike other schools such as Harvard and Princeton, the University recognizes these nuances, and it awards departmental recognition—distinction—independently from University-wide recognition—Latin honors. This is a well-reasoned policy that allows individual departments to set specific standards for distinction while still rewarding all-around academic success.
All this talk of Latin honors, though, underscores a larger point: this topic is not of particular concern for the general undergraduate student body, mostly because the University has instead chosen to place a concerted emphasis on encouraging students to complete independent research, theses and interdisciplinary projects that will allow them to graduate with distinction.
The University should be applauded for this approach. In the long run, it’s better for students to focus their energy on scholarship and research, rather than a competitive GPA race to the top of their class.
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