Pros and Cons of College Honors Courses

The infamous senior paper. This was something that I had been dreading all year. It came at the end of my senior year, when I was definitely no longer in the mood to work. In my high school all seniors were required to write one last paper in order to graduate. I remember talking to some of my friends about how much the paper was stressing me out. The members of my AP English class complained about how the students in other classes could pick to write about any topic that interested them. Some students would write about the affects of drugs, some would write about sports, or the debate over abortion. Pretty much anything that appealed to them and that could take up five pages.

My honors class was stuck with writing about ten pages of Shakespeare, or the feminist works of Kate Chopin, anything that had to do with reputable literary sources. It was just accepted that we were honors students and we had more challenging work. We couldn’t just breeze through this paper like every other student.

Why is it that two classes have such different guidelines for the same assignment? Students are grouped in classes based on their assumed intellectual abilities. This classifying is known as tracking. “In its traditional sense, tracking refers to the practice of sorting secondary school students into different programs of study, often called ‘college preparatory,’ ‘general,’ or ‘vocational.’ Ability grouping typically reflects similar sorting at the elementary and middle levels” (Wheelock 1).

It was not until I sat down to interview my high school English teacher, Mr. Sim, that I really began to see the problems with tracking. I have always been in the honors track ever since I was in elementary school, so I was evaluating the education system by how I was benefiting from school. Getting a teacher’s point of view, a teacher who clearly had some major criticisms regarding the practice, made me think about how other students are affected by tracking.

I attended Irvington High School, a small public school in Westchester County, New York. For the most part I had been going to school with the same kids since kindergarten. We had been separated into ability groupings early on. I remember being separated into reading groups and math classes in elementary school.