My son was sent the application for the program. Understand the smaller classes, and the connections with professors, but are the classes substantially more time consuming/difficult?
He is already going to be ROTC and wants to make sure he has enough time to do it all!
No honors and non-honor classes. Not high school. Yes, there is more work. Will vary from prof to prof.
My daughter likes it and it is more work, but useful work.
YES! Not necessarily more difficult than regular versions because it depends on base knowledge/skills and the course. More in depth. Not a matter of taking more time- you substitute the honors version for the regular, or in some cases do some extra work.
Your son needs to figure out his priorities. Number one should be maxing out on the excellent academic opportunities, ROTC should be a definite second priority. Therefore consider the courses first, ROTC should work around them.
There will never be time to “do it all” on the UW campus. Simply far too many choices for classes and activities. Decades later he will appreciate the academics so much more than doing ROTC- that can be done at any school.
A lot of flexibility with the Honors Program. No minimum number of classes in a semester- the catch is to do enough to get the honors degree. Many excellent intro level course sequences that start first semester. Chemistry, physics, math are STEM examples. Son got AP calc credit plus did the UW honors sequence- theory based (problem based for regular).
Depends on the student and their goals. My kid really enjoyed taking the Honors sections of larger lecture classes bv he had discussion section with the professor weekly and loved the smaller Honors stand-alone classes with students who were similarly interested in diving deeply into a topic. He jumped through the right hoops to complete requirements for Honors in the Liberal Arts – on occasion, doing the extended lab report or some other task to get Honors credit for a class that otherwise was not Honors was a pain, but not so big a pain that he didn’t do the work for Honors credit.
You get out of something what you put into it. For myself eons ago and for son recently the Honors courses were worth the effort (btw- same H course numbers have survived the decades).