Honors Day

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Each Spring semester an Honors Day Recognition Ceremony is held for undergraduate students exhibiting high achievement. Qualification for recognition is determined at the end of the third week of the Spring semester. 

Recognition at that time will be accorded to a full- or part-time undergraduate student who has (1) attained an undergraduate cumulative grade point average at SIU Carbondale of 3.50 or better and, if applicable, a 3.50 or better cumulative average in all undergraduate work (including transfer credit) recognized by SIU Carbondale;¹ and (2) reached the benchmarks of 12, 45, 75, or 105 SIU cumulative credit hours of coursework² since the prior year's qualification determination.³

Such an Honors student will be invited by the University to the next regularly scheduled Honors Day ceremony. An institution-wide recognition event will take place, as well as each academic unit scheduling its own ceremony. Each Honors student is recognized individually on Honors Day. Information about the Honors Day Recognition Ceremony is available through the Office of Events and Outreach.

1 In other words, at the end of the third week of the Spring semester, when looking at the registered student's transcript at that time, his/her cumulative institutional GPA must be at least 3.50, while his/her cumulative overall GPA (which includes any transfer work) must also be at least 3.50 ... subject to the credit hour benchmark condition that follows.

2 When looking at the student's transcript, this "SIU cumulative credit hours of coursework" refers only to the student's cumulative institutional Earned Hours of credit ... not the GPA Hours, not the Passed Hours, and not the Attempted Hours.

3 Traditionally, this Honors Day recognition was accorded only to full-time undergraduate students with the appropriate institutional (SIU-only work) and overall (SIU plus transfer work) GPAs. In the early 2000s, the Faculty Senate considered how to include part-time undergraduate students in such recognition, while retaining the rigorous standards that full-time students had been placed under. The eventual result that they came up with for both varieties of students was the system of the student reaching certain SIU credit hour (earned hour) benchmarks as an approximation of what the full-time student would normally be reaching during their four year program. (Thus the benchmarks themselves do not take into consideration any transfer credit hours.)