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9-Credit Hour Plans

Nine-credit hour plans permit Honors student access to at least 9 Honors credits within every major. These credits fulfill elective requirements for graduation with University Honors. The Honors College will collect, catalog, and maintain departmental plans and support their implementation. This includes managing the administration of contracts, and maintaining records and resources for honors contracts, including examples for instructors. Beginning Fall 2026, the Honors College will offer annual recognition and celebration of faculty across campus who are contributing to Honors completion through supporting students (Departmental Honors Liaisons, faculty mentoring students on thesis work, and faculty offering honors contracts).

Phase 1 - Departments develop and submit nine-credit-hour plans

  • To be completed by November 1, 2025
  • All departments with undergraduate degree programs to submit a plan enabling them to offer 9 HON credits for their students on a regular basis.
  • Plans can be highly flexible and varied by department (see an example plan). Your plan can use any combination of Honors contracts and/or HON-attribute courses, based on what works best for you and your Honors students. We welcome college-level solutions and approaches as well as department-level ones.
  • Use this form to develop and submit your plan: 9-Credit Plan Submission Form.

Phase 2 - Departments offer Honors Contracts and submit new HON courses for approval

Phase 3 - Full implementation of nine-credit-hour plans by Fall 2027

  • Beginning Fall semester 2027
  • Implement departments’ 9 credit hour plans in full, across all programs

FAQs

  • An HON attribute course is a course offered by a department or program, within a discipline, that can also be counted towards a students’ Honors credit requirements. It is not a course offered by the Honors College. Think of it as more analogous to a gen-ed or bachelor’s degree requirement course – for example, Psychology 1010 (PSY 1010) is offered by Psychology, but also meets gen-ed requirements.

    Click here for more information about HON attribute courses.

  • Honors Contracts give students a way to enhance non-Honors courses so that they provide elective credits towards the Honors degree, in collaboration with the course instructor. With an Honors Contract, a non-Honors class can count towards Honors elective requirements. Note that the work associated with the Honors Contract does not factor into the course grade and is evaluated on a completed/not-completed basis.

    Click here for more information about Honors Contracts.

  • Not at all. The goal is to provide a path, within your programs, for students to complete 9 Honors-designated credits. Contracts and courses are equally valid routes to this goal, and every single program has unique attributes, resources, and features which inform the best strategy for that program.

  • In this realm also, HON attributes operate similarly to gen-ed and bachelor’s degree requirements. So, if Psychology offers an HON attribute introductory psychology course, that course is PSY 1011 (Honors Intro Psychology). As a consequence, any incentive funds, enrollment credit, or other credits that are tied to SCH flow to Psychology. In addition, for programs where every student enrolled in programs has a meaningful impact on overall course fill rates, students enrolled in a ‘meets-with’ section are credited to the department offering the course – again, not to the Honors college.

  • HONOR courses are offered by (and usually paid for, in some fashion) the Honors College – these typically address breadth via interdisciplinarity. We are not asking for departments or programs to come up with these types of courses.

    HON attribute courses are offered by departments and programs and offer discipline-based depth – and this is the ask we are making here. One way to think of HON attribute courses is, “what would you want to provide for your top students – both honors college students and non-honors students in your discipline” – and "how might you serve those populations by offering specific courses?"

  • No. We would be happy to discuss the nuances of this issue further with programs where this concern looms large. Your 9-credit plans are a commitment to make the path to 9 credits available, and this can definitely be done without having to change the way you resource your course offerings in general.

  • No. 4999 captures Honors Thesis work across all programs on campus - a way you have always provided our shared students with a depth experience. We're asking for additional credits in the major - so 4999 is not part of the 9-credit plan. You could think of your 9-credit plans as positioinng students for success in 4999 within your department. 

  • Great! Tell us what you are offering by completing this form.

  • Yes! Honors students are required to take 9 credit hours of Honors electives. By taking them in your program (instead of elsewhere on campus), your students can complete the degree more quickly, and you may choose to leverage these Honors credits to provide instruction that supports Honors Thesis completion.

  • No--while departments are free to create brand new HON courses, many units may find it makes the most sense to create HON versions of existing courses, and to offer them as "meets with" courses. The only difference between the existing and HON courses can be the Honors-related work completed by students in the HON course.

  • For these purposes, admin will aggregate meets-with HON courses and their non-HON counterparts – thus looking at overall enrollment across both courses, and overall DEWI rates across both courses.

  • Yes! Online courses that meet the criteria for Honors Contracts and/or HON attributes can be included.