* WITH * HIGHEST HONORS

Of the approximately 1,600 seniors who will receive degrees today from the nation's leading academic institution, a very small fraction--just 7 percent--will receive an academic distinction that stands out above all others.

They will graduate with highest honors, summa cum laude.

The award is designed to recognize the highest level of achievement in academic endeavors and is based on the combined criteria of a departmental recommendation for highest honors and the approval of the Faculty at a degree meeting held in early June.

Candidates for the honor were informed of their status before the June 2 degree meeting; the names of those who will receive the degree will not be released until today.

Seniors who have been nominated to receive summa degrees today downplay the award's significance and some express dissatisfaction with the way their honors distinction was determined.

"For most seniors, what you graduate with isn't as important as it's made out to be," says summa nominee Jennifer M. Ty'96. "A lot of people are also accepted into some sort of graduate program or job, so what it says on their diploma has very little to do at least with their immediate plans."

But the honors distinction still has a powerful effect on the Harvard community.

"The last week of school when everyone starts to find out what their honors recommendations are.... It's very nerve-wracking", says summa nominee Susan S. Lee '96. "People talk about it a lot in the dining hall."

Departmental Evaluation

The criteria for departmental recommendation for highest honors varies from field to field, but is usually based on such factors as cumulative grade point average in the concentration, thesis evaluations, general written exams and performance on oral exams.

The weighting for each of those factors also varies, often depending on consideration of theses. Some scientific concentrations, such as chemistry, have no thesis requirement at all but provide honors based entirely on grades and exams.

In biology, Lee says that "for summa, it's not clear at all. It's very nebulous.... It varies a lot across the departments."

She says she was surprised to receive a summa nomination for her thesis, titled "Alcohol Dependence and the Brain: Towards an Understanding of Gene-Environment Interactions."

"I was hoping for a magna," she says. "That was my more realistic goal. The grades that I got back from my thesis were a lot higher than I expected."

Assistant Professor of Economics Andrew P. Metrick says that faculty members in his department are upfront about how the honors designations are determined.

"We're really quite out in the open," he says. "We do pretty much exactly what we tell students we're going to do."

In that department, grades and thesis evaluations each count for 40 percent of the evaluation, with the other 20 percent based on the results of the general written exams. But there is some flexibility--a very good thesis may be weighted as 50 percent and grades only 30 percent, Metrick says.

Thesis Grades

Theses often prove to be the most volatile part of the summa award evaluation, because they rely less on cumulative performance than overall grade point average does, instead reflecting intense work invested in one particular project.

"No matter what kind of formal structure you have in place," says summa nominee Bert I. Huang '96, "there's still a good deal of judgment on the part of the department.... Primarily [the thesis grade] depends on who your readers are and what your particular approach is."

For many of the successful candidates, thesis research begins long before the official starting date in autumn of senior year. In Huang's case, his relationship with adviser Lawrence F. Katz, professor of economics, grew out of a successful earlier position as a research assistant for the professor.

Other summa theses are less time-intensive.

"I wrote my thesis basically in a week," biology concentrator Lee says. "I felt like maybe I hadn't put enough time and effort into it.... I got caught up in recruiting."

In some departments, people the student has consulted for the thesis are not allowed to evaluate, or "read," the thesis; in others, such as economics, the adviser usually reads the thesis, since he or she is frequently most Knowledgeable about the subject area.

In such cases, there is always a second reader. Many departments also employ advanced graduate students in the area to act as thesis readers.

It is difficult to quantify what makes a good thesis, according to professors. They describe a gut feeling that a particular thesis deserves the summa distinction.

"The summa thesis, in my view, is not simply one that shows a great deal of thought and research and competence, although that's very good," says Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literatures Susan R.Suleiman. "It has to have some spark, something that makes you sit up and say 'Goodness, this is fantastic,' or 'Goodness, this is publishable' or 'Goodness, I wish I had written this.' Kind of like an A+."

Metrick describes similar criteria for the social sciences. He says that after reading a summa thesis, he should come away feeling that "I understand the world a bit better than I did before I read it."

Once the theses have been evaluated, many departments also require oral exams. In some cases, it is a thesis defense. In others, it is merely a review of knowledge in the student's particular field. In many departments, oral exams are only given to students who are eligible, or close to eligible, for the summa degree.

English concentrator Alice S. Chen '96 is a Rhodes Scholar, a Junior Phi Beta Kappa inductee, chair of Phillips Brooks House's CHANCE committee and a house committee officer who took five classes almost every semester.

She says she lost her summa candidacy when she had to face an hour-long oral exam.

"It was kind of strange, because they were trying to do it like a thesis defense," recounts Chen, whose thesis consisted of original poetry. Of her three oral graders, only one had read Chen's work.

"I don't think it would have helped if they had read it," says Chen. "They weren't experts in contemporary American poetry. I think it would have been more helpful if I'd had a more general oral."

Faculty Evaluation

After the evaluations are made within departments, recommendations for "highest honors" are passed on to the Faculty at a degree meeting, which takes place three times a year.

This year's final degree meeting took place on Monday, June 3. According to John B. Fox Jr. '59, secretary to the Faculty, there are usually about 45 faculty members, mostly head tutors and department chairs, at the meetings.

These meetings are usually run by the head of a docket committee of three people. This year's committee consists of Gray Professor of Systematic Botany Donald H. Pfister, the master of Kirkland House; Associate Professor of History Ellen Fitzpatrick; and Professor of English and American Literature and Language Daniel G. Donaghue, the docket committee's chair.

Faculty members evaluate all of the departments' recommended candidates and then inspect transcripts which contain records of all grades, not only those in concentration courses. They also discuss such factors as grade point average cutoff, a salient issue since mean grades can sometimes vary from department to department.

Fox says the meetings are often mere formalities.

"The only thing that happens is the department recommends someone who is numerically ineligible [overall]," Fox says. "There's no other way for someone who's recommended not to get a summa. Barring some conversation about something, [meetings] can be over in 15 minutes."

Most candidates with excellent grades (in the 14-plus range on Harvard's 15-point scale) in their concentration courses have little trouble with the rest of their Core classes and electives.

According to Fox, most of the nominees who do not receive summa degrees do not have high enough grades overall.

Today, 115 of the 160 summa nominees will receive highest honors, according to Associate Registrar Thurston A. Smith. He would not disclose the names of this year's winners or the departmental breakdown.

"Sometimes there are issues," says Fox. "Sometimes a department will say there's a particular reason that a rule shouldn't apply to a student of theirs because of some circumstance. You listen to the arguments, and you can accept it or not."

"You really have to do pretty well," says Professor of Astronomy Robert P. Kirshner '70, who is the chair of his department. "As generous and warm-hearted as the Faculty is, they're usually not willing to move the line that hundredth of a point that would make a difference."

Those nominees who are approved by the Faculty receive a summa degree; those who "cascade down," that is, receive lower honors than those which their department recommended, still receive recognition for the recommendation. For example, a student might receive magna with highest honors as opposed to magna with high honors, the standard wording.

Rates of cascading down vary. Metrick says economics nominees are not cascaded down.

"It never happens," he says. "We are far tougher than the College with respect to summa."

But Ty, a biology and anthropology concentrator who was recommended for highest honors by both departments for her Hoopes Prizewining thesis, says she is unlikely to receive a summa degree.

"I'm pretty sure [that I won't]," she says, "because my general grade point average is not high enough."

The Numbers

The number of students per concentration who receive summa degrees varies widely as well, with smaller departments tending to award a higher percentage of their graduates the degree.

Last year, more than half (56 percent) of the nine chemistry and physics concentrators graduated summa cum laude; 40 percent of the 10 linguistics concentrators did; and 22 percent of the nine concentrators in women's studies did. Meanwhile, large departments like economics or government hover around the more selective two percent range.

Bert R. Vaux, a lecturer on linguistics, explains the reasons for the high number of summa awards in his department. A qualifying thesis must be "highly original work to the quality level of a [master's] thesis, and it also has to be well-done technically speaking," he says.

"I would say that our department is a special case," Vaux says. "In the success-driven world of Harvard undergraduates, only a very special class of people will go into linguistics, where you're unlikely to get a job. So we get high-caliber students, so that might have something to do with the excessively high number of summas we give."

What It All Means

Most of this year's candidates, despite their record of high grades, still express surprise about their nominations.

"It's too rare to be something you can be realistically shooting for all the time," says Huang. "I think every stop along the way you try to do the best you can."

"It was interesting because the [Biology] Department coordinator...told me that a lot of times the people that do want to get a summa and are really fixated on it usually don't," Lee says.

Lee tells the story of one senior who refused to donate to the Senior Gift after his department recommended him for high honors rather than highest honors.

"Getting recommended for high honors needn't always be a wonderful thing. It could actually be more disappointing in the end," Lee says.

With the great variation in the determination of honors distinctions and the layers of bureaucracy surrounding recommendations in the last days before Commencement, some seniors--even those nominated for the summa degree--express some dissatisfaction with how it all worked out.

"My impression of having seen my friends go through it is that sometimes it's an imperfect process," Lee says.

Summa Surprise.

Just because a department is bigger doesn't necessarily mean it offers more summa degrees. A comparison using last year's statistics:

Departments awarding

2 summa degrees

vs. total # of degrees History  89 Hist. & Sci.  31 Women's Stud.  9

Departments awarding

4 summa degrees

vs. total # of degrees Government  194 Economics  167 Linguistics  10

Departments awarding

5 summa degrees

vs. total # of degrees Social Studies  90 Chemistry  49 Chem. & Phys.  9

Departments awarding

4 summa degrees

vs. total # of degrees Government  194 Economics  167 Linguistics  10

Departments awarding

5 summa degrees

vs. total # of degrees Social Studies  90 Chemistry  49 Chem. & Phys.  9

Departments awarding

5 summa degrees

vs. total # of degrees Social Studies  90 Chemistry  49 Chem. & Phys.  9