I read somewhere that Justice Roberts attended college at Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude in three years and that Senator Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University.
Recently I paged through a new graduation book (not of the above schools) but didn’t see anywhere Latin honors were mentioned. Are Latin honors only used by a few schools or nobody cares about them any more these days? Maybe I can tell my kid don’t worry about grades in college when he gets there.
For hiring new grads, employers still look at GPA.
Different schools use different terms. Not all use Latin honors. Some have “Distinction”, “High Distinction”, “Something Scholar”, etc.
There’s no standard anyway. “Cum Laude” could be top 30% somewhere and top 5% elsewhere. And some majors are much easier/harder than others.
And I hope that they want to do well for reasons other than achieving Latin honors. In any case, GPA may be considered for various things.
My daughter just graduated and students with Latin honors were listed separately in the commencement program. I think cum laude required a 3.5, magna cum laude required a 3.7 and summa cum laude required a 3.9. I have no idea how that works out percentage-wise.
A select few employers will look at an employee’s GPA. I don’t know anyone who was asked for their GPA after we graduated when they were hired- in fields ranging from bioengineering to education.
I don’t think they’re as common as they used to be. I graduated “with honor” but I think that meant I was in the top 14% or something random.
I think it is a big and ill-advised link to go from not having graduation honors to not caring about grades.
Latin honors may actually be more common now. I’m pretty certain my alma mater didn’t give out Latin honors when I went there (they had “with distinction”, “highest distinction”, etc.). They do now.
If you think about it, they don’t make much sense these days anyway.
Back when Harvard and Amherst students all studied the same liberal arts curriculum and there were no majors, tiering grads in to “magna”, “summa”, etc. conveyed some information.
These days, where some departments have rampant grade inflation while some others have an average GPA of 3.0 and they are in the same college, how does tiering by GPA or class rank make any sense?
Is a student with a 3.5 GPA majoring in a subject where the average GPA is 3.8 really better than a student with a 3.3 GPA majoring in a subject with an average GPA of 3.0?
Many schools have Latin honors (my D graduated college cum laude on Sat). As noted above the honors cutoff is different for each college which is why first employers/grad schools typically look at GPA instead. It would be a mistake to tell your child that college grades aren’t important.
My DD graduated summa cum laude in 2010 and a quick check of her alma mater’s web site confirms that they are still offering them. 
I graduated magna cum laude with highest honors in my major. I just needed one more A in a social science course to get full summa. It looks like they have the same system, though the method for determining Latin honors is a little different. http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/book/requirements-honors-degrees
I don’t think so. I see plenty of “Latin” honors around here, but as mentioned before, the cut-offs are all different. Oldest D graduated magna cum laude with a GPA of 3.85something. At her school, cum laude was 3.7, magna 3.8, summa 3.9. Had she gone to the school her younger sister attends, she’d have been a summa. Maybe it’s a tougher school, so fewer land above 3.85. Who knows.
I look at them the same way I look at weighted GPAs in hs. The designation has meaning, but mostly only within the school conferring the degree.
^Even within a particular college, I’m not sure how much meaning Latin honors has. If someone has a 3.8 GPA in a major where the average GPA is 3.8, is that really more impressive and deserving of honors than a 3.6 GPA in a major where the average is 3.0?
^^In that case, I’m just going with the belief that the school itself knows what should be worthy of honors, high honors, and highest honors. You know, like in high schools, where all APs are weighted the same, but “everybody” knows that AP#1 is a lot tougher, a lot more work than AP#2. Students get the same weighting for both. Just more hairs than I want to split.
And, I figure the Jesus majors may be pretty similar at many colleges. So those high GPAs in a particular major are probably competing against other majors from other schools that also have high GPAs. It probably all evens out.
At Yale, requirements for Latin honors were tightened, and (for example) cum laude went to those in the top 30% of the class, which turned out to be a 3.8. Summa was something like 3.95. (Brag: my daughter just got cum laude; back in my day it was based on a much easier grade cutoff, and I think more than half of the class was at least cum laude). There probably is some unfairness in that it’s easier to get those high grades in the sciences; although I think both of the summas in my daughter’s residential college were STEM majors.
D was cum laude which was top 5% in her class. Of course since it wasn’t a strict number cutoff she didn’t know until she graduated. She just missed magna.
I have always admired the Harvard system: summa and magna cum laude there really mean something. As for Yale, what I thought was the case in my day – which was pretty much the same as @Hunt 's day, if memory serves – was pretty much automatic GPA cut-offs at 5%, 20%, and 40% of the class for the various Latin honors levels, with an intermediate cut-off of 10% for Phi Beta Kappa. (And there was pretty much a 1-to-1 correspondence between summa and junior-year PBK.) Individual majors could award an undifferentiated “distinction” based on major GPA and your senior essay. I haven’t looked at my diploma(s) in a few decades, but I think my major and distinction only show up on my residential college diploma (in English), not the one I got in Latin from Yale University.
My kids’ college awarded undifferentiated “General Honors” (in English) on the basis of overall GPA (3.25 or higher, about 60% of the class), and undifferentiated “Departmental Honors” (also in English) on the basis of an honors thesis and minimum grades in the major. Lots of people got General Honors without Departmental Honors, fewer (but still some) got Departmental Honors but not General Honors. There was also Phi Beta Kappa, which generally seemed to go to the top 12% or so of the class by GPA.
@ordinarylives, I wouldn’t make such an assumption.
It helps, though, that evaluation for jobs and admissions to most grad/professional schools in this country are pretty holistic (only law school seems almost purely numbers-driven, and even there, a top LSAT is more valuable than a top GPA), so the major and difficulty of the curriculum is taken in to account directly or indirectly (so stuff like Latin honors aren’t such a big deal).
In places like Europe, there are more hard-and-fast rules and minimums.
Note: I meant to say that it’s harder to get those grades in the sciences.
My school used Distinction, High Distinction, and Highest Distinction back in the day. Not sure what the cut-offs were, but with a 3.8+ GPA, I was “high”. I’m more proud of the Highest Honors in my major, though. As I recall, only 5 students got that distinction.
Both my kids’ schools still have Latin honors.
Agree that that’s a odd thing to base working hard in college or not on.
IMO, having a diploma with Latin Honors is a nice thing to hang on the wall. Also it’s a nice thing to put on your resume and CV.
It’s a signal that may help in getting a second look at your application files.
But the main thing graduate schools and employers look at is your skills, and they will look at your GPA and degrees earned as well as the type of program and curriculum that you followed.
I know that when he was a senior at UChicago and my son was interviewed by a major consulting firm, they asked about his GPA, were interested that he had an “honors” GPA (which at the time was any GPA of 3.25 or higher). (He graduated “with honors” but that wasn’t known to the employer at the time.) They were more interested in his specific skills and interests, as reflected not only in his major (economics) and courses of study but also in his EC’s and even, in his case, his hobbies.
At Harvard, the thesis gets a Latin honor if the grade is high enough, which influences department honors, which then influences graduating with a Latin honor (because the department makes a recommendation, though overall grades are a factor too). Recently, 60% of graduates of Harvard College receive Latin honors.