Honors, my ass.

At the institution (hereforth known as TI), the word "honors," in my deepening experience, means little more than "I had a great GPA in high school."

Last fall I taught an honors first-semester comp course that was generally a positive experience and was populated with more than the regular allotment of above-average writers and thinkers. I sent three or four of their essays to the editor of our student-essay publication in hopes they might be published. This spring I have an honors second-semester comp course, and with rare exception the writing has been from competent and occasionally insightful to downright awful. The awful has been not just an honors kind of awful, which would be slightly below average in a non-honors section, but truly awful: nonexistent organization, inaccurate wording, sentence structure problems, syntactical nightmares. Writing problems, in other words, one sees consistently in developmental courses and often in non-honors comp (and, let's be honest, in lit courses too).

But it's not a mystery that such students qualify for our honors program, because there are many roads in. A qualifying student can begin the program from her first semester on or can take a few honors courses here and there and doesn't have to be "in" the program. Some of the possible roads in are a high school GPA of 3.5 (not difficult in most public high schools in our campus's immediate service area); composite 1800 on the SAT (very few get this, I imagine); various scores on the ACT, both subject areas and composite (a little more possible); a *current* GPA of 3.5 and at least 9 hours of college credit (probably catches a few more); or instructor recommendation (probably a few more).

I guess what I suggest is what the stock market shows: past performance is not indicative of future performance. And even if one contributes well in class and/or shows evidence of higher-level thinking, it doesn't automatically translate to writing. And there's the challenge of motivation, too. One of my current honors students is fucking brilliant beyond all measure and is much more widely read than I am; intelligence is pouring forth from this young man. But he's torpedoing his grade with his lax writing and his procrastination.

I know, I know: there are many ways to define intelligence. But there are slightly fewer ways to define motivation, and the majority of my honors students this time don't show it.