Honors Curriculum
| The Honors Program offers students a rewarding curriculum of smaller, more discussion oriented classes that complement work done in your chosen major fields. USD Honors courses are embedded in an alternative core curriculum. This arrangement allows Honors to be a part of the USD undergraduate experience without adding additional course requirements. |  |
Core Curriculum:
The Honors Core is made up of both honors classes and honors requirements. Requirements are courses available to the general student body. Honors classes are courses reserved for honors students and make up about half of the honors core curriculum and about 15 percent of an honors student's total coursework.
Honors Courses:
- Honors English (UHON 110)
- Honors Ideas in History (UHON 111)
- Honors Speech Communication (SPCM 101)
- Honors Interdisciplinary Civilization I & II (UHON 210 & 211)
- Three Honors Seminars (UHON 390)
- Honors Thesis (UHON 498) minimum of 3 credit hours
Honors Requirements:
- One semester of calculus (MATH 121, 123 or higher) OR one semester of pre-calculus and one semester Honors Logic
- One course in the fine arts (a one credit hour course is acceptable)
- One year of one laboratory science
- One year of one foreign language
- Note: Transfer, AP or CLEP credit is accepted for math, fine arts, science, Honors English (not CLEP), Honors Speech and foreign language.
Honors Seminars:
Seminars, which involve faculty from many disciplines, offer a wide variety of academic experiences. Professors from the graduate and professional schools at USD (such as Medicine, Law and Business) regularly offer honors seminars. One seminar may attempt to synthesize centuries of knowledge in a single field, another may try to pull together the current wisdom of several scholarly areas, while a third may present the research being conducted on campus by one of our leading professors. We'll offer honors students an opportunity to do work beyond that usually available to college students. And all are exciting in the way that real learning should be.
Honors Thesis:
Honors theses and projects are as diverse as honors students themselves; in the past they have included everything from a scientific experiment to a computer program to a novel to a suite for piano to a ballet.