Honors in Biology
Graduating with Honors for CALS Students
Consult your CALS advisor for more information regarding graduation with high or highest honors.
Graduating with Honors for CLAS Students
Students who graduate with an upper division GPA of at least 3.5 will be awarded honors (cum laude). To receive high honors (magna cum laude) or highest honors (summa cum laude), a student must also complete at least two semesters of research (with a total of at least 6 credit hours of ZOO4905 or its equivalent) and submit an approved thesis based on this research. The research must be conducted under the supervision of a UF faculty member and the program must be approved by the Undergraduate Coordinator. The research program should be started no later than the second semester of the junior year.
Any student intending to qualify for high or highest honors must meet with the Undergraduate Coordinator before the semester in which the student intends to graduate. The honors thesis must be submitted to the Undergraduate Coordinator in electronic format (i.e., preferably as a single PDF file) no later than 3 weeks before the last day of instruction (not the last day of finals) in the student's final semester. This deadline cannot be extended. The first page of the thesis should contain the thesis title, the student's name and major, the date of the thesis submission, and the name and affiliation of the student's faculty research supervisor. The student must later submit a printed copy of the thesis and the thesis submission form to the CLAS Academic Advising Center, following the specific guidelines and deadlines noted by the Honors Program.
A designation of "high" or "highest" honors will be initially recommended by the student's research supervisor. The Undergraduate Coordinator will then review the thesis and may request further review by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. In that case, the committee will also recommend a high or highest honors designation. The final honors designation is then determined by the Undergraduate Coordinator. In general, the criterion for “highest honors” is work that is "publication quality", although not necessarily "publication quantity" (i.e., it is frequently not possible for an undergraduate student to generate sufficient data in 6 credit hours for a scientific publication, but the data, analyses and interpretation should nonetheless be of the quality expected for a peer-reviewed publication).
