A SUMMA CUM laude degree looks impressive in a Who's Who listing, although this academic distinction is awarded no more prominence than its somewhat less impressive little brothers magna and cum. But in the Harvard academic family, the summas command the most respect, and when the family gets together for its annual commencement gathering, the summas--not the magnas and the cums--will garner the most praise.

So after the summa graduates receive the pat on the head from Mother Harvard and move out into the real world (some eventually returning to the University as professors to procreate more summas), they run into other summas and spend a night or two over a few drinks recalling the good old college days.

But few of these academic wizards actually know how they managed to reach the pinnacle. They understand little of departmental politics or the standards that each department uses to calculate honors, and probably they don't even care. Only the elite make it, and once they get there, the agony and the sweat of four years seems to have been worth the trouble.

The intense drive to make it to the top of the academic ladder is inexplicable at best. Departmental honors and undergraduate theses make little or no difference in determining an undergraduate's future: by the time departmental honors are awarded and the theses are graded, graduate schools have sent out their acceptances. In some cases, a high grade on the undergraduate thesis will help in getting into a second graduate school, but even in this instance, the master's work done in the first grad school is the primary factor.

Over the last ten years, a wave of grade inflation has hit Harvard. It is difficult these days to end up with a grade lower than a B minus in most social science and humanities courses. But as the grading of course work gets easier, the granting of departmental honors remains much the same, and undergraduates who do well in their courses feel slighted when Mother Harvard comes around to handing out summas to its children.

In most departments, course grades count only one-third toward determining the kind of the degree which the department will award. The thesis and written generals make up the other two-thirds. Some departments use orals in borderline cases, although a few (History and Literature, for one) require orals to graduate, regardless of the degree awarded.

WHAT ALL THIS means is that each department grants its honors in its own way, so it is not only difficult to understand why one particular student received a summa and another a magna, but is impossible to equate a summa in one department with a summa in another department.

The intricacies and idiosyncracies of the system are so complex, that often strange cases become academic horror stories. These apparent inequities seem unavoidable under the present system, a system that relies on the personalities of the department Faculty and the numerical scale which is used to calculate honors.

In the social sciences and humanities--the two fields where honors are granted in a necessarily subjective manner, despite the numerical scale--departments must be classified into three types: small departments, the honors fields, and large departments. The small departments like Classics and the Languages must be considered alone, for they operate as close knit groups on a very personal level. Classics Faculty members know everyone in the Department, and although an effort is made to keep thesis readers unaware of who is reading what thesis, the smallness of the department makes total secrecy impossible.

The honors departments--History and Literature, History and Science, and Social Studies--are also a bird of a different feather, primarily because they demand more of their students in terms of the variety of requirements. These fields limit the number of concentrators and contend that they provide more rigorous training, and, therefore, one would expect some consistency in the number of summas and magnas they award. But the departments show little statistical consistency in the granting of honors.

Last year, History of Science awarded six summas, one magna plus, and 11 magnas to a graduating class of 28. Similarly, in 1972 Social Studies awarded six summas, no magna pluses, and 18 magnas to a class of 44. The same year, History and Literature awarded one summa, no magna pluses, and 19 magnas to a class of 56.

It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that percentage-wise, these statistics don't compare. History and Science, with a graduating class exactly one-half as large as History and Lit, granted six times as many summas.

But 1972 was an unusual year. Today, two History and Sciences seniors will get summa, and four History and Lit graduates will leave Harvard with summas. So, the system fluctuates, and every up and down on the honors seismograph is carefully watched by honors-conscious seniors. But it appears that in the honors departments, no set standard exists that dictates how many will receive honors each year.

The most peculiar aspects of the system occur in the largest departments, specifically History, English, and Government. For years, academics have questioned the validity of subjectively grading honors theses in English, maintaining that it is nearly impossible to accurately judge the quality of a literary work. This logic seems to be borne out in the English Department. According to sources in the Department, there have been at least three theses for which one reader gave some form of summa and the other reader marked it with some degree of cum.

John M. Bullitt, senior tutor in English, says, however, that only a high magna-low cum discrepancy occurred this year. Bullitt may be technically correct after a fashion. But sources said that in two cases, submitted grades were changed before the final thesis grade was calculated.