By Elizabeth Grace ’15, Perspectives Co Section Editor

This year, the history department implemented all-honors first-semester history electives in place of their college prep counterparts offered in previous years.  Until now, history was the only department at Country Day that did not offer seniors an honors option.

The change, however, comes more in label than in curriculum.  Mr. Merle Black, History Department Chair, explained that these classes were already “at a level of intellectual rigor warranting an honors designation.”  Especially compared to similar classes at other schools, these senior history electives are not only treated as seriously as full-year classes but are also just as challenging and thought-provoking as other honors-level history courses at Country Day.  As the demand in these courses is so high, the history department wanted to ensure that students could aptly describe this difficulty in college applications.

While the honors designation more aptly describes the difficulty of these electives, there are other benefits to applying this change.  Honors classes at Country Day present students with weighted grades on a 5.0 scale compared to the typical 4.0 scale used in college prep classes.  For seniors undertaking challenging schedules with many honors classes, even an A in a college prep course could bring down their GPAs.

Mr. Black hoped that by offering seniors honors history classes, more would elect to take electives in their final year of high school.  “In recent years, some students have opted not to take senior history electives because their grade point average could be improved by taking an elective in another discipline offering honors courses,” he noted.  As a whole, the history department would like to see more (ideally all) students deciding to take history electives during their seniors years.

As of now, it is uncertain how the senior history electives will continue in the coming years.  Following this year, the history department along with the Upper School Curriculum Committee will meet to discuss the efficacy of this year’s approach and debate the best options for next year’s seniors and other classes to follow.  Whether the department will offer honors electives for the second semester, reinstate a purely college-prep line up of courses, present both honors and college-prep options, or simply maintain this year’s arrangement, no one will know until the conclusion of the 2014-2015 school year.

To Mr. Black, however, one thing is certain: “The greater and more important truth is that Country Day seniors have achieved a level of critical thinking, reading and writing skills such that segregating them into honors and non-honors courses no longer makes sense.”