OATdb Archive - Sam Houston State University

OATdb Archive

2010 - 2011

Honors Program

Goal

Attracting And Retaining Excellent Students

The Honors Program should continuously examine its approaches to attracting and retaining high-quality students.

Objective

Promote Higher Honors Awareness On Campus

The Honors College seeks to expand recruitment of current students (applicants from within the university). We will develop at least three effective initiatives for reaching this objective. This was an objective for last year that was not met. This is a good objective, so we decided to keep it and redouble our efforts toward completing it.

Indicator

Increased Promotions Aimed At Raising Applications From Current SHSU Students

The indication of increased visibility comes through the completion of the initiatives. The success of these promotion initiatives will be indicated by tabulating the percentage of increase in applications from candidates currently enrolled at Sam Houston (rather than beginning freshmen or transfer students). A second measure should be the number of applicants accepted into the program.

Criterion

3% Minimum Increase

The significant initiatives to promote internal growth should equal or exceed three. The applications from current SHSU students should increase by a minimum of 3% over the same period in 2009-10.

Finding

Criterion Exceeded For 2010-11

The Honors College continued five initiatives for promoting the Honors College to current students: (1) an Outstanding Student Reception, (2) a flyer posted around campus, (3) an Honors College video display in Academic Building IV, (4) an Honors FAQ distributed to interested students, and an Honors College banner displayed on campus. In addition, we added an on-campus flyer, a newsletter distributed widely across campus, an Honors poster, and an Honors slide for campus video displays. Our efforts succeeded. In 2008-09 the Honors Program had 81 applications from current SHSU students with 43 being accepted. In 2009-10, there were 70 applicants, of which 39 were accepted. The 2010 admissions represented a decline of 12%. However, in 2010-11, we added 55 new SHSU students, a whopping increase of 41%, which far exceeds our criterion, and which, furthermore, justifies our initiative. The supporting documents in this section indicated the promotion initiatives undertaken this academic year.

Action

Retain Successful Initiatives

We are gratified to have stayed with this effort, and we intend to improve on it for the coming year. One of our sore points has been the disappointing number of current students we attract. Now that we have had this success, we look forward to raising our internal recruitment even further.

Goal

Enhance The Overall Honors Educational Experience

The honors program should strive to provide avenues for academic and scholarly fulfillment both within and beyond the honors curriculum

Objective

Expand And Enhance Honors Involvement In Undergraduate Research

In order to grow its role as an educational leader on campus and to assume the responsibilities of becoming a college, the Honors College should strive to expand research opportunities and support for honors students as well as to become the center for undergraduate research at the university, both within and beyond the Honors College.

Indicator

Increased Participation In The Undergraduate Research Symposium

The 2010 Undergraduate Research Symposium established the Honors College as a campus leader (perhaps the campus leader) in undergraduate research, we still identified areas for improvement. Our participation, though heavy, was not distributed well across the colleges, and we still had a higher ratio of presenters to audience members than we would like. For 2011, we made strenuous efforts to increase the number and types of presentations and particularly to increase the number of total conference attendees (especially those who simply attended and did not present).

Criterion

Percentage Increase In Levels Of Participation

Last year's URS was a success, but we hope to increase the number and types of presentations (say, 5% more presentations, as well as a greater variety of presentation types) and in particular to increase the number of participants by 15 to 20%.

Finding

The 2011 URS: Greater Variety And Greater Participation Achieved

Our goals of an increase in types of presentation and a 5% increase in presenters were met. We had more representation from the College of Criminal Justice and the College of Business, and we had more session presentations and fewer poster presentations. (We increased the number of paper sessions from 12 to 22. The number of student presenters rose from 88 to 98 (and increase of 11%). We also exceeded our goal for number of participants. We enjoyed an increase from 136 attendees in 2010 to 220 in 2011, an increase of 62%, far exceeding our goal of 20%.

Action

Retain Expansion And Improvement Initiatives For The URS

While the URS was a great success for the Honors College (and the Honors Ambassadors, who did much of the work), we have already held an assessment and planning meeting for next year's event. We will look for ways to build the participation among both student presenters and faculty. We will target the low-participating colleges and departments. We look forward to an even better event next year, but this year's success solidified our presence as a major promoter of undergraduate research here at SHSU.

Objective

Enhance And Improve Efforts To Gather Feedback From Students

Heretofore, we have not done as good a job as we could of gathering input and feedback from Honors students about the College and our programs. We are actively seeking to improve our methodology for collecting, studying, and acting on student input.

Indicator

Increased And Enhanced Gathering Of Feedback From Students

In the past, we have relied too much on anecdotal evidence of our successes and failures. We have engaged in an examination of feedback-gathering methodologies used in other honors colleges in the National Collegiate Honors Council. Like them, we are undertaking to learn through systematic collection and examination what our students think about various components of the program components.

Criterion

Honors College Exit/Graduation Surveys

Since we are beginning from practically zero, our criterion is simply the establishment of a successful honors graduation exit survey. We began with the December 2010 and May 2011 graduating classes. We surveyed them for their rankings of the benefits of various program components which we wanted to examine more closely: scholarships, early registration, honors housing, honors advising, cultural outings, honors seminars, events, and facilities.

Finding

The First Annual Honors Exit/Graduation Survey

We are gratified at the strong positive response to our first survey. Some of our anecdotal expectations were confirmed, such as the strong sense that our students view early registration as one of the finest privileges we have to offer. We also discovered a few surprises about honors housing and contracts.

Action

Actions Dictated By Survey Results

Based on the high and positive response rate, we will refine this Honors exit/graduation survey. We will examine the results more formally before the fall semester begins, but we can already tell that our students want us to hold strong to certain practices (early registration, honors advising, scholarship distribution, and honors contracts). Preliminarily, we expect to review policies and practices for the honors thesis and certain honors course policies.

Update to previous cycle's plan for continuous improvement

Plan for continuous improvement The Honors College enjoyed a successful assessment year in 2010-11. While our Undergraduate Research Symposium was already a success--a tremendous improvement over the first two years--our 2010 post-URS assessments revealed initiatives that we could act on to make it even better. As a result of that careful fact-gathering and systematic assessment, we did not simply rest on what was a successful program, but rather we pushed forward aggressively to improve it even further. The results articulated above underscore that the Honors College is a primary agent in undergraduate research at our University. We assessed and acted on those assessments, and the result was that we exceeded what were fairly ambitious goals. Immediately after this year's URS, we met to assess this year's effort. Based on those assessments, we are moving forward to an even more successful fifth SHSU Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Following the lead of our senior administrative coordinator, we have begun a (long overdue) program of assessing our students' satisfaction with and reaction to various components and practices of the college. This is something we have been doing through anecdote and hearsay, but now we have taken baby steps toward a more comprehensive and methodical set of assessments--beginning with a graduate exit survey. The results of our first surveys including both gratifying and troublesome findings, both of which have moved us to examine our program and to initiate needed changes. This is the first of what will become an expanded and more methodical attempt to survey our students about their satisfaction with our program.

Two particular and particularly troublesome aspects of recruiting honors students have been itching at us for some time. The first is the number of first-year students who are qualified for Honors but who choose not to join. That problem is a continuing source of concern and wonderment, and we are strenuously trying to find ways to attract more of those students. The second conundrum is the gap created by artificial admissions criteria (SAT/ACT, high school rank, and high school grades) which we (like almost all honors colleges in the country) use to identify first-year candidates. We know that these criteria are not perfect and that some students who do not qualify for first-year admission will come to college and do splendidly. This objective is very important--to try to identify those students before they have progressed too far in their curricula and to invite and entice them toward an honors education. This past year's success (after the relative failure of the previous year) is particularly gratifying. We believe that, after trying, revising, and trying again, we have hit upon a formula for reaching and attracting honors-worthy students from among our existing student body. This is an initiative that we will definitely retain for future years.