Eligibility
Students are encouraged to take CMSC396H, but it is not required to qualify for or graduate with CS Honors. In order to be eligible for CMSC396H, a student must have at least a 3.3 major GPA and at least a 3.2 cumulative GPA. There is no longer an application to the program.
Your CS GPA is computed of only major courses (e.g., 131, 132, 216, 250), not special or non-major CMSC courses (100, 106, 198, 298).
Coursework
In order for a student to graduate with a CS Honors citation a student is required to have:
- At least 3.5 major GPA and 3.25 cumulative GPA
- Completed a graduate level CMSC course OR an honors version of a CMSC course (not including CMSC396H)
- Wrote and submitted and honors thesis (single author document) by the time of graduation and had it approved by their advisor
- Honors thesis advisors should be faculty in the Computer Science department at UMD; please contact the honors chairs with any inquiries about exceptions to this rule.
Research
The bulk of the CS Honors requirement is performing independent research. This can take place in multiple ways, including paid summer internships and for research credit (CMSC 499). Earning credit to perform research is especially beneficial to students who have otherwise packed schedules and cannot perform research in addition to a full courseload. To this end, the department offers CMSC 499, an independent research course with your faculty mentor during which you will complete your honors thesis. That said, CMSC499A credit is not strictly required.
Honors Thesis
Your honors thesis is a document culminating your research. Although there can certainly be collaborative aspects to the work (little research is performed totally independently nowadays), it should largely reflect your individual contributions. It should be formatted using the ACM SIG style, and should fit in 5 to 12 pages.
The honors thesis should include:
- A statement of the problem being solved and its importance.
- A description of the faults of prior approaches.
- A description of the insight that solves the problem in a new way or shows that the problem can be solved.
- Sufficient technical contribution to warrant an honors thesis.
- A conclusion section that restates the main contributions of the thesis and presents future work.
- At least five academic references.
Individual Effort
A student's honors thesis must be the student's own work, not a collaborative group project with other students. Only collaborators who act in an advisory capacity (providing edits, feedback, direction, suggestions, etc.) may be listed as coauthors.
The key ideas in the honors thesis should be largely the student's own. The problem may be specified by an advisor, and the methods to try may be chosen by others. However, the bulk of the intellectual work to evaluate the ideas should be the student's own.
Group project reports may not serve as honors theses. (Gemstone, QUEST, DCC, and other University programs create group projects.) However, a student may write up an individual contribution to a larger project, if that component is advised by CS faculty.
Group project documents, e.g., multi-author conference papers, are not allowed. Students participating in such a project may write up their contributions as a separate, complete thesis document.
Incomplete documents will be rejected, whether caught by advisors or by the honors chair. For example, clear TODO items such as "TBA", "XXX", "TODO" will be returned.
Exceptions
These requirements represent the path through the honors program that we expect most students to take. It is possible to substitute similar experiences for the explicit milestones described here.
High Honors
High Honors are rarely given; the advisor’s recommendation is necessary but not sufficient, and the honors chairs make the final decision. High honors students have had exemplary grades and have typically done two projects or have had one published in a refereed conference or journal.
Apply to Graduate With Honors
If you are currently in the Honors program and have completed (or are in progress) with the requirements, you can submit your intent to graduate with honors and your thesis using this form: Apply To Graduate With Honors
Interested?
Contact the Honors Chairs at honors-chairs [at] cs [dot] umd [dot] edu, look at previous projects elsewhere on this site, or browse the faq.