Compared to its top competitors Harvard and Yale, Stanford awards relatively egalitarian honors programs at graduation. Harvard, for example, has both “Latin” honors, like magna cum laude, and “English” honors, like “High Honors.” Yale has three tiers of “Latin” honors as well as a separate “Distinction in the Major.” Stanford, in contrast, awards only two distinctions, “Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction,” for the overall top 15 percent of students with the highest grade-point average and “Honors,” for those who complete a satisfactory thesis.

Excessive stratification does not seem to benefit either students or their prospective employers. Law schools, medical schools, I-banking firms and the like care far more about the actual numerical GPA than what Latin term is attached to it, according to the Career Development Center. Moreover, it is difficult at a high-achieving school like Stanford to argue that a distinction needs to be made between someone in the top 5 percent and the top 10 percent. The highly-stratified system at other schools would also seem to incentivize “grade consciousness” and competition, aspects that the Stanford academic culture, compared to Harvard and Yale, thankfully lacks.

To reward the cohort of students that do exceptionally well, some honors system does need to exist. And Stanford does have two different systems — overall GPA, and the completion of a thesis. Awarding Honors simply for completing a thesis, however, does not represent the right spirit of either the thesis-writing experience or rewarding overall academic achievement at Stanford. About 25 percent of each class chooses to write a thesis in senior year, and while many write the thesis purely for the opportunity to write a long and very focused researched academic paper, the appellation of honors for completing it is certainly a strong incentive as well.

The experience of writing a thesis should be separated from honors. Many students do very well in their classes and have a very high GPA, yet choose not to write a thesis for whatever reason: a time-intensive internship, research at a lab or leadership in an organization. It is hard to argue that those students who write a satisfactory thesis automatically deserve honors while those students who simply do not write do not deserve it.

Students should write a thesis purely for the experience it provides. Doctorate programs, for one, certainly want their students to engage in original research. However, honors should be about overall academic achievement across all four years and in different disciplines. Most schools, both the top tier and others, reward performance both overall and inside the major, the latter often with faculty input. Stanford should adopt a program similar to that; students who are exceptionally proficient in many fields will be rewarded for their efforts, as they currently are, and those who are exceptional inside their major will also be recognized. This frees the thesis to be a work of pure academic love.

Reform of the honors system at Stanford will lead to a greater appreciation both of what it means to write a thesis and what it means to do exceptionally well in class. But as long as we do so without the excessive stratification found at other schools, we can maintain Stanford’s unique academic culture.