Honors Faculty Resources
Information and ideas about modifying your curriculum to create an Honors Contract Course, teaching an Honors course, advising Honors students, and serving as an Honors Thesis Advisor.
What is an Honors Contract Project?
An Honors Contract Project is a student-initiated agreement between you and a University Honors Program (UHP) student to provide additional, honors-level coursework beyond your regular course requirements. This allows students to earn honors credit for courses that do not have designated honors sections.
Honors Course Contracting
Your Role as Faculty
The contract process is designed to be collaborative and flexible. You work with the student to develop meaningful coursework that demonstrates deeper engagement with your course material. The additional work should connect meaningfully to your course content but goes beyond what's required of other students. The Honors contract work should reasonably take about 1 hr/week (~15 hrs total) for a 3 credit course.
Common Contract Activities
Past contracts have included diverse approaches such as:
- Independent research projects related to course topics
- Creating educational materials or demonstrations for outreach
- Lab work or field experience with faculty research
- Advanced analysis equivalent to graduate-level expectations
- Service learning or community engagement projects
Timeline and Requirements
- The Honors contract work should reasonably take about 1 hr/week (~15 hrs total) for a 3 credit course
- Students must approach you and submit contracts within the first two weeks of the semester
- Extensions may be granted, but the student must email an extension request to the Honors Director, Dr. Sarah Robey, sarahrobey@isu.edu
- Students provide templates and checklists to guide the process
- The Honors Program Director reviews and approves all contracts
- You evaluate the honors work using the same grading timeline as your regular course
- No incompletes are permitted without prior approval from the Honors Director
Important Notes
- Students must still complete all regular course requirements
- The honors work is in addition to, not instead of, regular coursework
- Your final grade should reflect the quality of all their work, including the contracted work
- The process is student-driven—you're not expected to initiate or design everything, but rather to assist and guide
- You may re-use contracted projects in your course
- This system gives motivated students deeper learning opportunities while allowing you flexibility in how that's achieved within your expertise and course structure
Please visit the Contract Courses for Honors Credit webpage for more detailed information.
A Quick Guide to Honors Contract Projects
Successful Honors Contract Projects are original, unique, engaging for both the student and the faculty, beyond the normal scope of the course, and have a clear connection to course content. They are not busy work and are not vague.
Non-eligible courses include those already offered as Honors courses, those that have an Honors section, or Bengal Fit (BFIT) courses.
Don't
- Create a project that is "busy work" or "extra work"
- Create a project that neither the student nor the faculty are interested in
- Create a project that has no clear connection to the course
- Create a project that has no tangible outcome
- Submit a contract for work that has already been accomplished
Do
- Create a project that takes students deeper into the course content
- Create an imaginative project, in fact, the more imaginative the better
- Engage in higher levels of thinking
- Involve ongoing research or create a new research agenda
- Stay commensurate with the number of credit hours earned