Penn's honors classes take a deeper dive into popular subjects

For students who want to dig deeper into a subject, honors courses can be an opportunity to take intro courses on a more intensive level.

“The honors is an enrichment course,” chemistry professor Donald Berry said. “Some people choose to teach it with a heavier emphasis on the rigorous math and physics background of some of the material … 115 is not an exact duplicate or mapping of Chem 101. It is some of the similar material, but it is taught at a more advanced level.” 

Not many classes at Penn have honors alternatives; those that do — Chemistry 101 and 102, Finance 100 and 101, Math 114 and 240 and Physics 140 and 141 — are introductory math-based courses that often serve as prerequisites for more advanced courses in their subjects.

“I think the main differences are that [the honors class is] smaller, so there’s going to be more discussion,” said finance professor Jessica Wachter, who teaches the honors section of Finance 100. “The other difference is that it’s more analytical in terms of the amount of math and statistics, and that enables us to go deeper into the finance.”

Honors classes in general tend to be smaller, holding around 35-60 students. Wachter’s class, the honors section of Finance 100, has between 25-35 students per semester; the main section of Finance 100 has 110.

The professors emphasized that non-honors versions of classes were not less impressive or less useful; they warned that students should not take honors classes simply because of the prestige that the “honors” title carries.

“You have students who think, ‘Oh, I should take the honors course because I’ve always done that before,’” Berry said. “And no, this is a much more in-depth class, expecting lots of things.”

Instead, students who take honors versions of classes tend to be students who have a genuine intellectual curiosity for the subject or who may prefer a more in-depth mathematical approach.

“I thought the honors section would be more quantitative,” said Wharton sophomore Aillen You, who took the honors section of Finance 100 last fall. “Instead of just using formulas, we would derive some of them, and I thought that was pretty cool, to be able to understand what we were using.”

While honors courses do not require that students declare or intend to declare the relevant major, many do go on to study the subject that the course teaches.

“I’ve seen a lot of students do very well in the course who are not math nerds — I mean, it’s a very good class for math nerds too — but I’ve definitely had students take the class who did not come in with a strong math background but were very interested in finance,” Wachter said. “I think the finance motivated them to study the math behind it.”

Because spots are limited, some students who hope to take honors classes may not get in. While Finance 100 and 101 require students to submit applications the previous semester, the other honors classes do not.

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