- Title
- The role of honours in contemporary Australian education
- Creator
- Kiley, Margaret; Boud, David; Cantwell, Robert; Manathunga, Catherine
- Relation
- http://www.aushons.anu.edu.au/
- Publisher
- Australian Learning and Teaching Council
- Resource Type
- report
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Australian Honours degrees began evolving from various British models in the late 19th Century. As the Australian curriculum developed to reflect the culture of the emerging nation and to serve its educational and employment demands, so did Honours. ‘Honours’ is used in Australian higher education in a variety of ways. It may refer to a specific degree that follows an undergraduate program. It may be a name given to a level of achievement. It may be awarded primarily on a thesis, or entirely on coursework. Degrees may be ‘Honours degrees’ or ‘degrees with Honours’. To add to the complications, variation in naming and practice even occurs within institutions as there are radically different practices in different disciplines. Honours degrees fall between undergraduate courses and Research Higher Degrees (HDR). It is worth noting that in some cases Honours has been awarded at the postgraduate level, often as a component of Masters Degrees, but in this paper we are only referring to ‘undergraduate’ Honours. Honours does not fit readily in quality assurance processes for coursework or research programs and it is mostly ignored by research into higher education. These problems might not be significant if it were not for the fact that the First Class Honours degree tends to be treated as the ‘gold standard’ of undergraduate education within the Australian higher education sector, even though there has been disagreement on this practice. Honours has been the most commonly cited entry requirement into the PhD and has set the standard for most postgraduate scholarships. But Honours is not only a pathway to PhD. Our study finds that ‘Honours’ is not fully understood and the extraordinarily diverse range of practices covered by Honours programs are generally unacknowledged. It also finds that there are some broad areas of agreement about its aims and outcome underlying the variation. This Report sets out the complexity of Honours uncovered in our Australian Learning and Teaching Council Project, The Role of Honours in Contemporary Australian Higher Education.
- Subject
- Honours; research programs; higher education
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1058676
- Identifier
- uon:16453
- Language
- eng
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