...THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME

Bernstein says it is impossible to predict what will happen to individual students under the new system.

“We are not doing anything differently this year, and expect, based on past experience, to continue to recommend the vast majority of our students for honors,” Bernstein writes, adding that the College has almost always accepted social studies’ recommendations in the past, occasionally giving a student a lower level of honors than that recommended by the concentration based on overall cutoff levels for the College.

“Because social studies students tend to be slightly stronger than Harvard students as a whole, we expect more than two-thirds of our students to receive Latin honors under the new system,” she says.

Nor do concentrations expect their students to have trouble earning admission to graduate and professional schools, even if fewer of the students applying have received honors.

Nakayama says that students who have chosen not to write theses and have not received honors in the past have still had a great deal of success in applying to graduate programs.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.