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Curriculum Guidelines

Curriculum Guidelines

Upper-Level courses

Upper-level honors courses involve intellectual challenge beyond standard business courses. The intellectual challenge could take various forms such as accelerated content, substantial independent work, or deeper levels of inquiry, integrative perspective, or strategic insight. Business courses that qualify as upper-level honors courses will generally have one or more of the following markers:

  • More intellectually challenging workloads for honors students (special assignments, cases, presentations, etc.)

  • Quantitative methods or coding projects that advance beyond the level required for the student’s major

  • Demanding reading, discussion, and writing. These courses should have multiple (but not necessarily all) of the following indicators:

    • significant amounts of reading from top-tier academic journals or challenging primary sources

    • seminar format with substantial and regular discussion

    • multiple pages of writing per week and/or long papers reflecting independent thought and work*.

Capstone courses are a subset of upper-level courses. They have the feature(s) of upper-level courses listed above and additionally have one or both of the following features:

  • The course involves significant engagement with and analysis of top-tier academic research in business.

  • Students apply skills and business knowledge gained from prior courses to a major question or issue, typically in new, distinctive, or innovative ways. The project or application should involve skills and business knowledge gained specifically from business courses. The idea is that the project or application should have important facets that only a seasoned business student could address.

Classroom environment: In addition to the above features for honors courses, it is also encouraged that, when appropriate, course topics be covered in a participatory fashion in which students discuss “why” questions or critically evaluate the subject’s assumptions, tenets, practices, arguments, evidence, and findings.

Grading: Grading in honors courses should reflect appropriately high expectations for work quality. Because the student composition and quality expectations of honors courses differ from those of other courses, instructors may, at their discretion, deviate from the standard Mendoza grading guidelines in positive or negative directions.

*A guideline for a “long paper” would be approximately 3,000 words (or approximately 10 pages double-spaced with normal font). Two papers of approximately 1,500 words would be considered equivalent. If papers are written in teams, then the paper length should average to these guidelines per student on the team; e.g., a team of three students would be expected to produce a paper of approximately 9,000 words.