Honors Opportunities

Entering and matriculated first-year students who show promise of outstanding achievement in the arts and sciences are invited to participate in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program. In addition to regular coursework, School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program students pursue an enriched curriculum that includes:

• special interdisciplinary honors seminars taught by leading faculty members
• honors sections of regular courses, many of which fulfill school distribution requirements
• discipline-specific honors courses that fulfill major requirements
• Honors Colloquia, which are 1-credit forums in which students attend lectures, film screenings, art exhibits, and other academic and cultural events on and off campus
• and a Capstone Project typically completed in the senior year

The School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program offers extensive personalized advising, a Faculty Mentor Program, a Summer Reading Program, and funding for research. Also available are honors residential options on each campus, a peer mentor program, and a variety of cultural and social activities.

For details, see sashonors.rutgers.edu.

Many departments have a departmental honors program for outstanding students in their majors. Small group seminars, honors course sequences, specialized advising, and senior thesis programs are available in certain departments. To find out more about the specific offerings of the departmental honors program in a particular department, visit the website for your major program.

Each semester SAS offers a set of honors courses which are open to honors students in New Brunswick Arts and Sciences. The curriculum includes small honors sections of first and second year courses as well as topical, interdisciplinary, and more advanced discipline-based courses. The honors experience in these courses includes components such as more extensive written work, different readings, sophisticated discussion, non traditional instruction methods, "hands on" work, group work, independent work, research experiences, field work, and others.

Phi Beta Kappa, established in 1776, is the oldest and most widely recognized liberal arts honorary society in the United States. The Alpha chapter in the State of New Jersey was established at Rutgers College in 1869, and the Douglass College section was created in 1922 with the graduation of the first class from the New Jersey College for Women.

Each spring term, the Phi Beta Kappa Society invites to membership the outstanding students of the junior and senior classes. Election to the society is based on high academic achievement, a record of course work that is at least three-quarters liberal in nature, proficiency in a world language through the intermediate level, a minimum of two years equivalent of full-time course work at Rutgers University, and breadth of scholarship.

For more information, please visit: https://pbk.rutgers.edu/.

The National Society of Collegiate Scholars is an honors organization which recognizes outstanding academic achievement among first and second year college students. The Society was founded in 1994 at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and has grown to 218 colleges and universities nationwide. The three pillars of the Society are: Scholarship, Leadership, and Service. For more information, please visit: https://nscs.org/

Many departments, in addition to departmental honors programs, also have Rutgers chapters of national and international honor societies in their discipline. 

The bachelor's degree is conferred with the distinction summa cum laude for graduates with a Rutgers cumulative grade-point average of 3.850 or higher; magna cum laude for those with an average of 3.700 or higher; and cum laude for those with an average of 3.500 or higher. Averages are not rounded to the next higher number in the calculation of honors.  For more information, please visit Graduation Honors.