Latin Honors: What Cum Laude, Magna and Summa Actually Require

Cum laude means "with praise." It is the honor your college prints on your diploma if you graduate near the top of your class.

Here is the confusing part. At USC you need a 3.5 to get it. At the University of Maryland's College of Education, the next level up took a 3.999.

Both numbers are true right now. So when you look up the GPA you need, the answer you find can be way off for your own school.

You have probably seen this set of numbers:

• 3.5 for cum laude

• 3.7 for magna cum laude

• 3.9 for summa cum laude

They are not wrong. They are exactly right at USC, at Texas A&M and Ohio State, and at plenty of community colleges. They are just not right everywhere. At UCLA, cum laude started at 3.923 last year.

The reason is that colleges use two completely different ways of deciding who gets honors. Once you know which one your school uses, the rest makes sense.

What Cum Laude, Magna and Summa Mean

These are Latin phrases. Your college adds one to your diploma and your transcript when you finish with a high GPA. There are three of them and they stack:

• cum laude means "with praise." This is the first level.

• magna cum laude means "with great praise." The middle level.

• summa cum laude means "with highest praise." The top level.

You say them koom LOW-day, MAG-nuh koom LOW-day, and SOO-muh koom LOW-day. Plenty of people say LAW-dee instead. Nobody is going to correct you.

Three things tend to surprise students:

You do not apply for it. At almost every school it happens automatically. Texas A&M spells this out: there is no application, and eligible students get the honor and the stole without asking.

It looks at all your classes, not your major. Latin honors comes from your overall GPA. Departmental honors, an honors college and an honors thesis are separate things with separate names, and you can have one without the other.

You find out late. Most schools work it out after your final semester is graded. Columbia announces Latin honors after graduation has already happened.

Your School Either Sets a Bar or Grades on a Curve

This is the part that explains everything else.

Some schools set a bar. They publish a number. You hit it, you get the honor. If everyone in your class hits a 3.9, everyone graduates summa cum laude. Ohio State works this way, and so do USC, Texas A&M, Penn and Arizona State.

Other schools hand out a slice of the class. They decide the top 5% get summa cum laude, then look at the grades afterward to see what GPA that turned out to be.

You are not racing a number. You are racing the people graduating with you. Yale, Columbia, Duke and Notre Dame all work this way.

This is why the numbers at some schools look impossible. UCLA's cutoff is not 3.923 because UCLA grades harder than USC. It is 3.923 because a lot of UCLA students finish with high GPAs, and only a set slice of them can be honored. Same honor, different math.

If you are at a slice school, two things are true:

• Nobody can tell you your number ahead of time. Not even your registrar. Northwestern does not publish its cutoffs at all.

• The number moves every year. Notre Dame sets its cutoffs in February, calculates them to three decimal places, and does not round up.

How to check which one you are in. Search your school's name plus the words registrar latin honors. Your school's own page is the only one worth trusting, because these numbers change and your school is the only place publishing the current one.

Find Your School

Three groups below. If your school is not on the list, the group it belongs to still tells you what kind of answer to expect.

Schools that publish a fixed GPA. You can know your target today, and it will not move.

Look at the Cornell row. Summa there takes a 4.00. One A-minus in four years and it is gone.

Cornell is also in the middle of changing the whole thing. Starting with December 2026 graduates, the university switches over to the slice system.

Two-year colleges usually set the bar lower, and most publish it plainly. Cum laude starts at:

• Durham Technical Community College: 3.25

• North Shore Community College: 3.30

• Community College of Denver: 3.50

• Howard Community College: 3.50

• College of the Canyons: 3.50

Most two-year colleges also want about half your credits earned with them. Penn State uses the same idea for associate degrees, at 30 credits.

Schools that hand out a slice of the class. Here the honor is a rank, not a score. Where a school publishes what that rank came out to, the figure is in the last column with the year it applied to.

Two rows there belong side by side. At UC Irvine, cum laude in Engineering took a 3.742. In Nursing it took a 3.921. Same university, same year, same word on the diploma, and almost two tenths of a grade point apart.

Which college you are in matters as much as which university you are at.

Maryland's College of Education shows what a slice can do at the far end. Magna cum laude there landed at 3.999. That is a perfect record with a single slip in it somewhere.

It happened because the top of that class was packed tight, not because Maryland set out to be harsh.

Schools that call it something else, or do not give it at all. If you have been searching for cum laude and coming up empty, this is probably why.

If your school is in this group, write down what it gave you. Graduated With Highest Distinction is the accurate line, and employers read it the same way they would read summa cum laude.

Not sure where your own GPA sits right now? The GPA calculator will work it out in a minute, either for one semester or cumulative.

Harvard Once Gave Honors to 91% of Its Graduating Class

In 2001 the Boston Globe went through Harvard's numbers and found that 91% of Harvard students were graduating with honors. Nearly half of all grades handed out were an A or A-minus, up from a third in 1985.

At that point the honor was not telling anyone apart.

Harvard capped it at 60% of the class. Today the cap is half: 5% summa, 15% magna, 30% cum laude. In May 2025 that worked out to 3.989, 3.931 and 3.762.

That story is the case for the slice system in one paragraph. Set a fixed number, let grades drift upward for thirty years, and sooner or later everybody clears it.

It is not a settled argument, though. Boston College went the other direction and dropped the slice system for fixed numbers, starting with the Class of 2021.

A fixed number is something you can plan around. A slice is fair to your class, but it tells you nothing until it is over.

The Fine Print That Can Move Your Number

You found your school's number. These rules decide whether the GPA you are looking at is even the one that gets measured.

Not all your credits count. Most schools want a big chunk of the degree earned with them. Temple, Maryland, Texas A&M and Ohio State want 60. Michigan wants 58, and 45 of those have to be graded.

UConn wants 54. Rutgers wants 45. UC Irvine wants 72 University of California units and UCLA wants 90.

Transfer credits often do not count. Arizona State only looks at coursework done at ASU, so grades you brought with you neither help nor hurt. USC does the opposite and checks twice: you have to clear the line on your USC work and on everything combined.

If you are still thinking about when to transfer, that changes how many credits you will have left to earn wherever you land.

Some schools ignore your first two years. At Florida, honors runs on your upper-division GPA, which means the coursework you took after your first 60 credits. A rough freshman year costs you much less there.

Rounding will not save you. Ohio State does not round. Notre Dame goes out to three decimals and does not round up. USC cuts the number off rather than rounding it. A 3.4999 is a 3.49.

Getting in trouble can cost it. At Penn, a probation-level sanction under the academic integrity code makes you ineligible no matter what your GPA says.

Does Graduating With Honors Change Anything?

There is real research on this, which is rarer than you would think for a question students ask this often. Two economists, Shu Shen Khoo and Ben Ost, published a study in Labour Economics in 2018.

Their approach was clever. Since honors depends on a hard GPA cutoff, they compared students who landed just above the line with students who landed just below it.

Those two groups are near enough identical. The honor is the only real difference between them.

What they found:

• Honors graduates of selective schools earned about 4% more.

• At less selective schools, there was no effect they could measure.

• The bump faded. By the third year out of school it was gone.

So Latin honors helps you land a first job. It is a signal for employers who do not know anything else about you yet. Once you have a work history, it stops doing much.

That cuts both ways. It is a good reason to protect a GPA that already sits close to a cutoff, and study habits in your final year matter more there than at any other point.

It is a bad reason to load up on easy classes, drop a major you like, or make senior year miserable. If you finish one A-minus short, what you missed is small and it does not last.

Where it keeps mattering is graduate and law school, since admissions committees read your transcript closely and the honor sits right on it.

How to Write It Once You Have It

Keep it lowercase and keep it in Latin. On a resume it goes on the same line as your degree:

B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, University of Southern California, 2026

Some style guides italicize it and some do not. Both are fine. Do not translate it into English, do not capitalize it in the middle of a sentence, and do not upgrade it. Cum laude is cum laude.

If your school gave you Distinction or High Honor instead, write that, word for word.

On LinkedIn it belongs in your education entry rather than your headline. Recruiters who care about it know where to look.

One thing worth doing today: find your registrar's Latin honors page and work out which system you are in.

Fixed number? You have a target you can plan against. A slice of the class? You have a range, and a good reason to keep your grades up through the last semester, because nearly every school counts it.