No, never has. 
D2’s school announced at graduation that there would be no latin honors because everyone was a special snowflake (or impoverished from sending so much money to them for four years) [paraphrase].
It depends what you mean by “really”! It makes enough of a difference to generate this thread . . . but the reality quotient of that is pretty low.
I do wonder how many person-hours and brain cells at Harvard have been devoted to the question whether honors should continue to be the only portion of its diploma still in Latin, and why they are still abbreviating their undergraduate degrees as if they were conferred in Latin while actually conferring them in English. Stupid questions, yes, but I bet I’m not the first to ask them!
Those Latin terms referred to different gpa levels. Honors refers to meeting requirements of an Honors Program/College. At UW this meant taking various courses for Honors credit (needed a B or better in an Honors course/section) plus a senior Honors thesis or a certain number of grad level courses in the major (math lends itself more to those grad courses than trying to do research). Therefore it does NOT mean the same thing. One could have a high gpa with regular courses, vastly different than taking Honors courses in the same major.
@wis75, actually, different colleges have different rules for all sorts of honors (Latin or otherwise).
Some go by GPA levels. Some go by highest x% of a class. Some only give it for a thesis. Some for those who jump through the honors hoops. And of course, some have departmental ones and some have different honors and rules by school. Some give some type of honor to over half their graduating class. Some are extremely difficult to get.
Basically, there’s no standard.
D2 is graduating with Latin honor because of her thesis, one more cord. The thesis took over her senior life, so it means a lot to her.
Definitely NOT a thing of the past at Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering!
LATIN HONORS
At graduation, a select group of students are awarded Latin Honors. Degrees with Latin Honors are awarded as follows:
Summa Cum Laude: the top five percent of McCormick graduates
Magna Cum Laude: the next eight percent of graduates
Cum Laude: the next 12 percent of graduates
http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/students/undergraduate/student-prizes-awards.html
Does it matter? Well, son already has a job, so probably not, except he is hoping that an athletic concussion senior year spring does not cost him bragging rights over his girlfriend’s honors ranking. Bragging Rights at Thanksgiving might mean a lot in forty years… 
If the diploma were written in English, having an honors designation in Latin might be a little pretentious. (I wonder what university would do that . . . . ?)>>
We have four of them from three universities in this house - one being mine from 1985.
“D2’s school announced at graduation that there would be no latin honors because everyone was a special snowflake”
Bryn Mawr chooses not to permit a Phi Beta Kappa chapter for more or less this reason – all our graduates are high achievers in liberal arts. They do have Latin honors.
@Massmomm My D also chose not to do an honors thesis in college. She graduated cum laude but not with the Departmental Honors designation (which only goes to those who have written and defended a thesis). My D did a lot of research with professors and did not want to saddle herself with a thesis. Never regretted her decision for one second. She had time to enjoy her senior year, continue with the research she was doing, and go through the application process for grad school in a careful and thorough manner (not only writing her applications, but also missing a few days for interviews and accepted student days). She was eternally grateful not to have the added pressure of a thesis weighing her down. We all survived graduation quite nicely without her having Departmental Honors.
Some of her friends really enjoyed their thesis writing process. But others ended up regretting how much it dragged down their senior year – two friends ended up dropping their thesis because it became so all consuming.
In short, if your child is not excited and totally invested in the idea of doing a thesis, I’d let it go.
Honors at Wisconsin meant, and still means, many separate courses in many different fields. Vastly different content in several sciences. Honors means taking those courses, plus the thesis/grad level courses. Very different than achieving a certain gpa in regular courses. Research in a science lab was fun whereas for math taking higher level courses made more sense.
Forty years later so much life has happened those HS and college years are extremely ancient. Too much else to brag about at Thanksgiving (or not). Even the kids are likely past college and what they did in HS and college is superseded by life in the real world or grad school…
For Pitt:
For S’s department, neuroscience:
Both of my kids attended schools with Latin honors. At my son’s school, Latin Honors were based upon the departmental faculty’s evaluation of a senior thesis. Phi Beta Kappa was by grade. Then there was also something by distinction. My daughter had Latin Honors based upon grades maybe by department, a Phi Beta Kappa equivalent that seemed to be based on grades, and then in her case a field-specific honor society.
My sense, incidentally, was that Latin honors were tougher to get at Princeton than at Harvard – a much higher percentage of the Harvard graduating class got the various level of Latin honors. But, looking things up, Sotomayor, Alito and Kagan all were summa cum laude graduates of Princeton.
^ Up to 60% of Harvard’s graduating class gets some sort of Latin honors. As I said before, there’s not any sort of consistency.
@Hunt Do you happen to remember the cutoffs for magna and summa at Yale this year? Congrats to your daughter by the way.
I don’t recall the cutoffs. They were pretty high, though.
In Latin, is it “SVMMA CVM LAVDE” or “SUMMA CVM LAVDE”? Are “SVMMA” and “SUMMA” two different words? I googled and saw both but don’t know which is right (or maybe both are right).
^ Penn there uses SUMMA, but what about other colleges?
Can someone who knows Latin tell the difference between “SUMMA” and “SVMMA” if there is any? I thought about recommending my son learn Latin. Not a good idea.
When I took latin, I was told that in writing the Romans only used V. In speech, there were different sounds, contextually derived, for the “V” in an consonant role and “V” in the vowel role. The “V” consonant was probably close to the english “w” and the “V” vowel was close to the soft “u”.
I was taught, although I am skeptical, that “V” was easier to carve into stone than “U”. It’s not like they didn’t have some forms of paper. But, I was taught, clay tablets were more common for teaching and “V” was easier than “U” with a stylus.