Honors Requirements

Students representing all majors — arts and humanities, business, natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, computer science, social sciences, and creative and performing arts — participate in the four-year Honors Program.   As with all DU students, the requirements set out in the Bulletin for the year they entered must be satisfied for graduation, and Honors Program requirements reflect these. Students graduate with University Honors upon satisfaction of the following requirements:

• completion of the Honors sequence of courses,
• achievement by graduation with a GPA exceeding a prespecified limit,
• satisfaction of all requirements for departmental distinction.

For a complete list of Honors Program requirements, visit the University Honors Program Web site.

Departmental Distinction Requirements

Graduation with Departmental Distinction provides a mechanism to recognize those students who have made significant academic achievements in the area of computer science during their undergraduate careers at DU. This recognition is specific to the technical discipline and open to all students pursuing BS and BA degrees in Computer Science and Game Development and Applied Computing. Participants in the University's Honors program must complete the requirements of Departmental Distinction.

The requirements for Graduation with Departmental Distinction are:

• Cumulative GPA exceeding 3.3
• Successful completion of an undergraduate research project, including a Research Paper and presentation.

The undergraduate research project is an individual project in a computer science-related discipline. The emphasis of the undergraduate research project should be on making a novel research contribution.

Process

Eligible students and their faculty advisors should complete an application form. The student and advisor will select another faculty member to serve as the reviewer of the project. The reviewer will serve to ensure that the research paper meets professional standards and is of a quality deserving of Departmental Distinction.

The student will write a Research Paper detailing the project. The Research Paper should be ~10 pages of text, not including figures, tables and references. The Research Paper should roughly model the format and content of a conference or journal paper. Sections should include: abstract, literature review, methods, results, and discussion. Content from a submitted or published conference or journal paper can be substituted for portions of the research paper provided it was written by the student. The student will receive feedback from the faculty reviewer. After the reviewer comments have been incorporated, two copies of the final Research Paper should be submitted to the department.

The presentation can be in the form of a poster at the Undergraduate Symposium or an oral presentation before students and members of the faculty.

Important Deadlines

Contact: M. Rutherford (Assistant Professor, CS, mjr@cs.du.edu).