Honors Program
The Honors Program offers courses in a wide range of disciplines, emphasizing academic rigor and pedagogical creativity. The Honors Program encourages academic independence in its students by emphasizing inquiry, self-direction, and self-regulation in all academic endeavors. The program celebrates an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Through tutorials and seminars, honors students are challenged to synthesize information across disciplines, developing a broad awareness of knowledge connectedness. Honors students are challenged to apply the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom in ways that provide stewardship and service to the Marymount community, the surrounding DC community, and the environment. The Honors Program, through its academic and extracurricular programs, encourages initiative, responsibility, integrity, and collaboration among its students.
Honors students must fulfill all program requirements, maintain a minimum GPA of 3.5, successfully write and defend their thesis, and participate in Honors Program events and activities to maintain program benefits. Participants must earn at least a B in each honors course to earn honors credit.
The Student Academic Hub will provide primary academic advising. The honors director will provide additional advising specific to the honors curriculum.
Curriculum Overview
Students in the Honors Program are required to earn 18 - 21 credits of honors coursework, depending upon how many college credits they enter the program with.
Students who are admitted to the program with fewer than 29 college credits must complete 21 credits of honors coursework. Those entering the program with 29 or more college credits, are required to complete 18 credits of honors coursework.
The curriculum is designed so that each incoming first-year student in the Honors Program completes one honors course (3 credits) per semester during their first seven semesters to successfully achieve the 21-credit-hour requirement.
Students admitted to the Honors Program after the first year may be expected to take more than one honors course per semester in some instances to successfully complete the 18 to 21-credit-hour requirement. Students are permitted to enroll in a maximum of two honors courses per semester.
- HON 101 The Quest: An Introduction to the Honors Program (3 credits - this course will be waived for students entering the program with 29+ credits)
- Honors Seminars, Honors Contract Courses, or one Graduate Course (6 credits)
- Honors Tutorials: one Traditional (HON 200) and one Advanced (HON 300) (6 credits)
- HON 399 Research Tutorial: Thesis Proposal (3 credits)
- HON 400 Research Tutorial: Thesis (3 credits)
Oxford Summer Study Program
The Honors Program’s mix of seminars, tutorials, and lectures fits Marymount's intimate educational environment, pays tribute to the liberal arts tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, and prepares Marymount honors students for graduate and professional school. To reinforce these aims and to provide a global perspective for honors students, the program offers a six-week study tour at the University of Oxford every summer, enrollment numbers permitting. Students take a total of six academic credits: three credits with a Marymount faculty member in an Advanced Honors Seminar and three credits with an Oxford faculty member in a Traditional or Advanced Tutorial (HON 200/300). They also travel on sponsored trips to London.