What is an Honors Student? A Noel-Levitz Survey

In an impressive article published in the 2005 summer issue of JNCHC,Cheryl Achterberg laments the lack of empirical data available to provide a workable definition for honors students. While she duly notes that there is an “ideology ” that honors students are “superior ” to other students in an insti-tution or of “high ability ” or “the best and brightest, ” she laments that “[t]here are few characteristics of honors students that can be standardized, measured, or uniformly compared across institutions ” (Achterberg 75). She concludes her article with these considerations: honors students are “not a homogeneous group with a set of absolute or fixed characteristics”; they “have much in common with other non-honors students of their own age group”; they “are (or should be) academically superior to their non-honors counterparts within any given institution”; and they “are probably little different today than the honors students of yesteryear. ” Achterberg calls for more research to under-stand “how honors students develop academically, intellectually, socially, emotionally, and as leaders relative to their non-honors peers ” (79). In the same issue of the JNCHC, Rosalie C. Otero finds honors students