Faculty voted 79 to 15 in favor of a proposed change to the college’s Latin honors system on Dec. 10 at a plenary faculty meeting in Wilson Hall. The new honors system will drastically restrict the number of graduates who receive Latin honors, eliminate the Valedictorian and Salutatorian titles, and remove the semester-based College Scholar distinction.
Starting in July 2025, Middlebury will allocate honors based on a percentage, rather than a GPA cutoff. The top two percent of students will receive summa cum laude (what would have been 21 students for the class of 2024), the top 15% will receive magna cum laude (102 for the class of 2024) and the top 30% will receive cum laude (116 for the class of 2024). There will be no changes to departmental honors.
In the current system, students with a GPA higher than 3.90 receive the highest Latin Honors rank of summa cum laude, students with a GPA higher than 3.75 receive magna cum laude and students with a GPA higher than 3.50 receive cum laude. Last year, this meant that 91% of graduating students received some level of Latin Honors, with 56% receiving summa. The changes to the system follow the footsteps of peer institutions including Williams College, Carleton College and Bowdoin College.
Much of the meeting’s discussion revolved around the larger issue of grade inflation at the college, and faculty acknowledged that the new system would do little to tackle such a widespread problem. During the meeting, Professor of Political Science and Faculty Council member Bert Johnson explained that part of the impetus for proposing the new system was to create the possibility that grade inflation might one day be solved.
“By moving to a percentage system that is the two percent summa, 15% magna, 30% cum, rather than adjusting GPA cutoffs, by doing that we open the possibility that grade inflation could actually be solved as a problem, and we wouldn’t have to change the percent cutoffs. In other words, if grades started going back down again, that wouldn’t necessarily affect the college honors system,” he said.
Some professors wished that grade inflation –– one underlying factor bringing faculty to propose changes to the honors system –– was being addressed head-on, before conversations about the honors system.
“The issue isn’t our system, it’s grading. And the fact that we’re spending all of this time talking about adjusting the system, rather than very vigorously investigating grading inflation, strikes me as getting things a little bit backward,” one professor said. “We’re solving for something that we should be fixing first.”
One professor advocated for garnering further student feedback before implementing changes that would shift honors from being based on GPA cutoffs to student rankings. Another professor argued that student input should not be considered –– Latin honors are given by the faculty to the students, and therefore should be at faculty discretion.
The decision to eliminate the Valedictorian and Salutatorian statuses was based on the number of students who recently graduated with a 4.0 GPA: In May 2024, there were nine students who graduated a 4.0 and three were named Valedictorian, which reduced the significance of the title.
The updated honors system will remove the College Scholar distinction, which is currently awarded to students with a semester GPA above 3.60 and no grade below a B. The Dean’s List, currently given to students with a semester GPA above 3.30 and no grade below a B, will now be awarded to the top 15% of full-time students each semester.
As with the changes to Latin honors, this ranking-based allocation is intended to allow for grade inflation or deflation. This shift also mimics the policies of peer institutions, which all have only one tier of percentile-based semester honors. If grading remains consistent with recent years, the Dean’s List cutoff will most likely be a 4.0, meaning more than 15% of the student body will receive the distinction. In fall 2023, 24.8% of full-time students had a 4.0.
Before voting to approve changes to the system, faculty also discussed a motion to eliminate the Latin honors system altogether, debating whether a college-wide honor system is the most effective way to bestow merit on Middlebury students. While faculty were hesitant to completely abandon the system and ultimately voted against the motion 65 to 26, there was widespread agreement among faculty that the current system is not working as intended.
One professor suggested that this system does not always recognize the students who have pushed themselves the most academically. The motion to dissolve the entire system received support from other professors, who questioned the role of Latin honors in upholding Middlebury’s competitive culture.
“Our current system reinforces a faulty and harmful belief among our students that high grades are the goal of a Middlebury education. I think we should be emphasizing exploration, learning and growth as the goals of a college education,” another professor said.
Maggie Bryan '25 (she/her) is the Senior News Editor.
Maggie is a senior at Middlebury, majoring in Environmental Policy and French. She previously held roles as Senior Arts and Culture Editor, Arts and Culture Editor, and Staff. During her free time, she loves running, listening to live music, drinking coffee, and teaching spin classes. She is from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Evan Weiss '25 (she/her) is a News Editor.
Evan is an IGS major and math minor from Philadelphia, PA. When she's not editing for The Campus, she's either working as a peer writing tutor, running on the TAM, or eating chocolate chips from Proc.
