Does is mean “Bachelor of Science” with honors, or an Honorary degree?
Best guess?
What you said–BS with honors. I don’t know of anybody that gives out honorary bachelor’s degrees!
From this page.
Reading between the lines, I’d say it’s Bachelor of Science with Honors.
OK - Thanks
On a side note, my boss is getting an honorary bachelors this week. He never went to college. And, now that I think about it, he has at least one other honorary bachelors.
I stand corrected!
OK, so now the question has mutated to this: How would your boss put that degree on his business card, if he so wished?
This is where it gets a bit complicated. He earned his own JD, so if he were to link his name to anything, it’d just be that, not his honorary BA degrees.
I assume that the degree is from a Canadian or British university, so I’m a bit of a loss for how one might do that properly… consulting my Webster’s (American) Dictionary, it seems like the US convention is to only mention professional degrees, like:
John Doe, Esq. (for an attorney)
or
John Smith, D.V.M. (for a vet)
I guess that’s not much help
[Baltimore inside joke]Maybe that’s what they call your degree from the University of Baltimore.[/Baltimore inside joke]
Over here a BSc (Hons) would be a Bachelor of Science with honours - “Hons” is an abbreviation of “Honours” not “Honourary” (hence the “s”).
I have, for example, a:
"Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History with Theology & Religious Studies."
Which translates as:
My Major was in History
I minored in Theology & Religious Studies (hence the “with”)
I earnt honours (in my case by doing a bloody good dissertation)
So officially on my Business Card i can put Garius BA (Hons).
If i’d recieved an Honourary degree then i believe it would be written:
Garius BA (Honourary)
Because i’d have to specify that it was honourary.
Similarly i believe that if it was a BSc then if it was honours i would be:
Dr. Garius BSc (Hons)
but if it was honourary i’d be:
Garius BSc (Honourary) - i couldn’t call myself a doctor.
Saying that, garius, I’ve very rarely seen a degree without honours. All the major university degrees are with honours as par for the course; you can only get it without honours if you screw up along the way somehow. As such, on business cards and signed documents (the only place the initialisations tend to get used IME), the “(hons)” is universally dropped. I, for example, am kabbes MA, not kabbes MA (hons) on everything I’ve ever signed or given. (In fact, and rather wonderfully, I’m actually kabbes MA FIA, but that’s another story).
pan
Nah, you’d just be Garius B.Sc. (Hons.)
Of course that doesn’t stop a bunch of medics with nothing more than batchelor’s degrees going around calling themselves “Doctor”. Oh, and they don’t like it when you point that out.
The Great Unwashed B.Sc.(Hons.), M.Sc.
I stand corrected on the Dr thing. And i know what you mean about earning an honours - at my Uni they were quite picky about it and it was judged on whether you completed a particularly good dissertation.
I wonder if there is any difference between the qualifiers for an “honours” here in Britain and the qualifiers in America.
I got a Bachelor of Arts with Honors and Distinction in International Relations from my college, but that was basically departmental honors. A college or university here will usually confer degrees cum laude, summa cum laude, and magna cum laude. I don’t think it’s standard practice to mention any of those honors when listing your degrees after your name…
and for full disclosure, I also have an MSc with Distinction (read: 2:1 honors) from the other side of the pond. I wouldn’t dare try to explain that on a business card.
My bachelors degree (which I am in process of completing) is officially named “Bachelor of Science, Honours Major Biochemistry”. The “Honours” part has to do with the number of credits I need to graduate - 20.25 as opposed to 15.00 (a course credit at this university it 0.5/course - I have no idea why). It appears to me that most undergraduate degrees are honours, at least judging by my cursory glance at the BSc pages of my course calendar.
On top of that, however, it is possible to graduate with “Standing”, with “Honours” or with “Distinction” depending on your cumulative average. As things are now, I’m looking at probably graduating “with honours” in an Honours major. It is not possible to get the standing/honours/distinction title unless you do an Honours major.
This is in Ontario, by the way.
This may vary with the university, but that’s not the way it worked at the university I attended. The regular B.A. was a three year degree; the honours degree was a four year degree, with additional class requirements (i.e. - honours seminars - you couldn’t just stay for an extra year and take more second year courses). Students in the honours program also had to maintain a higher grade average than students in the regular program. Also, the honours program didn’t have the qualifiers “distinction” and “great distinction.” There were two categories: “honours” and “high honours.”
If you didn’t maintain the higher average, you just got a regular B.A. I wouldn’t call that “screwing up” - just didn’t meet the higher standard. Nothing wrong with a regular B.A., which still requires considerable effort.
The high honours degree is abbreviated thus:
“Northern Piper, B.A.(H.Hons.)”.
The abbreviation for an honourary degree is “honoris causa”, listed after the earned degrees. So, if any university is ever foolish enough to give me an honourary degree, it would look like this:
“Northern Piper, B.A.(H.Hons.), LL.B., LL.D (honoris causa)”.
Holding a B.Sc (Hons), my experience pretty much mirrors NP’s.
In Australia, most science degrees are straight batchelor 
degrees held over three years. Some courses offer a fourth year for selected students, others are four year courses with the Honours component built in.
The key is that the base course is normally pure coursework and examinations, the Honours component involves a project/thesis.
“My” uni awarded four honours classes … First class (av High Distinctions), Second Class Division I (av Distinctions), Second Class Division II (av Credits) and the rarely awarded Third Class … most IIIs being awarded as straight batchelors degree due to a lack of bragging rights.
In South Africa, having a degree with honours indicates an extra year of study in a more specialised area. I have a BSc(Hons) in Chemistry for example.
Most bachelors degrees last three years and require that at least two subjects be studied and passed in each of the three years (the majors). The honours year is a post-graduate year, and they are normally only in a single subject (although some departments run joint programmes - Maths and Computer Science for example). If you wish to progress on to a Masters or a PhD programme, the honours year is normally required. The classes are small and very intense and part of the requirement for graduating is the submission of a research project - this lasts ten weeks and is closely supervised and guided, but is “real research”, in that you are investigating something new. My research project was an attempt to discover the 3D molecular structure of a peptide hormone from a locust. Separately, you can graduate with “distinction” - either in one or more subjects or the degree as a whole - in recognition of academic excellence at the undergraduate level.
The exceptions to this rule were the Engineering and Business Science degrees which were automatically four years, and the (Hons) descriptor is used to indicate academic excellence much as the “distinction” tag is for other degrees.
Grim
But hold here, folks. I would be surprised if the structure of degrees didn’t vary enormously from country to country. Frankly, I’m surprised that they apparently even go by the same name (e.g. BSc). There’s no reason to assume that the honours degree in one country is particularly comparable to another.
I’m quite prepared to believe that a BA (hons) in Australia, for example, is a very different beast to a BA in Australia.
In my university in the UK (Cambridge), however, you had to get at least a third class degree in each year of the three year course to obtain an honours degree. If you passed any year without a third class then you received your degree without honours. If you failed any year then you were kicked out. But there was a very thin window between a straight pass and a third class. This meant that it was very rare to have the kind of degree where you didn’t get honours.
And that’s just one example. Every university is different. I don’t rally think that you can formulate a general rule.
pan
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My degree is another case in point where things vary from country to country. In Australia, I’ll graduate with the degree B.VSc (Batchelor of Veterinary Science) after a 5-year course of study (entered straight from high school) at the ripe old age of 21. I’ll then be eligible to practise as a vet. This degree is equivalent to the D.V.M. (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine) from north America, and if I pass the board entrance exams over there, I could practise in the USA or Canada. And I still get the title ‘doctor’ (in Australia, anyway).
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By the way, honours in my degree is on-course- they take your GPA for the last 4 years, and if it’s above the cut-off point you graduate with Honours I, IIA or IIB. About half the class manage to graduate with honours, I’m told. And I’ve never heard of an honourary veterinary degree.