What does cum laude mean? Cum laude is Latin for “with praise” (also translated “with honour”), and it is the first of three Latin honours colleges award at graduation to students whose final record stands well above the ordinary degree: cum laude (“with praise”), then magna cum laude (“with great honour”), then summa cum laude (“with highest honour”). One warning belongs here, because most guides bury it: there is no universal GPA cutoff for any of the three. No national body sets the thresholds. Each college sets its own — some as fixed GPA bands, others as a slice of the graduating class — so the same grades can earn magna cum laude at one university and no honour at all at another. Every number below is therefore printed beside the school that publishes it.
The three Latin honours at a glance
| Honour | Latin meaning | Order | How it is decided |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cum laude | “With praise” / “with honour” | Third — the entry tier | Your school’s GPA band or class slice |
| Magna cum laude | “With great honour” | Second | A higher band or a smaller slice |
| Summa cum laude | “With highest honour” | First — the top tier | The highest band or the smallest slice |
The words are the same everywhere; the bar is not. Laude is the form of the Latin laus, praise, and the two higher tiers are built by adding one word each: magna, great, and summa, highest. So what does cum laude mean in practice always depends on one thing: what the college printing it required for it.
Cum laude: “with praise”
Cum laude is the broadest tier: the honour for the first clear step above a solid degree. It says the student’s cumulative record across the whole degree — not one good semester — cleared the school’s honours floor. Its cutoff varies most visibly: 3.5 at the fixed-band schools below, 3.4 at one of them, and far higher at percentile schools, where the floor is wherever the top slice of that year’s class ends. Anyone who says cum laude simply “means a 3.5” has read one school’s rule and mistaken it for everyone’s.
Magna cum laude: “with great honour”
Magna cum laude is the middle tier: a record clearly above the cum laude group — in fixed-band systems usually two tenths of a GPA point higher, in percentile systems a smaller share of the class. A fixed band is knowable from your first year; a percentile band is a moving target set by your classmates’ grades as much as your own. Magna is not a different kind of achievement; it is the same ladder, one rung up.
Summa cum laude: “with highest honour”
Summa cum laude is the top tier, and at many schools the rarest by design. Some colleges reserve it for a very small top slice of the class, some set its floor at 3.90 or 3.95, and some add a requirement beyond grades — Harvard’s route, described below, runs through a departmental honours recommendation built partly on a thesis, so a near-perfect GPA alone does not settle it there. If a guide claims summa requires “a 4.0 or higher,” treat that as a warning sign about the guide: 4.0 is the ceiling of the standard scale, and the real published floors below run from 3.80 to 3.99.
There is no universal GPA cutoff — here are real ones, named
Colleges use two different machines to award the same three phrases, and confusing them is the source of nearly every wrong answer online.
Fixed GPA bands. The college publishes numbers; clear the number and the honour follows, however many students clear it:
- The University of Maryland, Baltimore County registrar (UMBC, public) awards summa at 3.95–4.0, magna at 3.75–3.9499 and cum laude at 3.5–3.7499 — only to students with at least 60 graded credit hours earned at UMBC itself.
- The University of Texas at Tyler registrar publishes summa at 3.90–4.00, magna at 3.70–3.89 and cum laude at 3.50–3.69, with at least 45 semester hours completed at UT Tyler.
- The University of Illinois Chicago registrar sets summa at 3.90 and above, magna at 3.75–3.89 and cum laude at 3.50–3.74, on the GPA earned at UIC.
- West Virginia University’s registrar runs the ladder a step lower: summa at 3.8 or higher, magna from 3.6, cum laude from 3.4.
Class percentiles. The college awards the honours to a fixed share of each graduating class, so the GPA floor is calculated fresh every year and cannot be known in advance. Harvard College is the clearest documented case: its honours process page explains that the cutoffs are set so that at most 5% of the class receives summa cum laude, 15% magna cum laude and 30% cum laude, are determined annually just before commencement, and for May 2026 graduates landed at 3.987 for summa, 3.925 for magna and 3.741 for cum laude in field. The University of Maryland registrar runs a tighter version: honours go to the top 10% of each College or School — the highest 2% summa, the next 3% magna, the next 5% cum laude — and its published tables for recent classes show cum laude floors as high as 3.900 in some colleges.
Side by side, the point makes itself. A 3.6 is magna cum laude at West Virginia, cum laude at UMBC and UT Tyler — and no Latin honour at all at Harvard or Maryland, where it may not reach the honoured slice. A 3.5, the figure most websites print as “the” cum laude requirement, is simply the most common fixed floor: a real number at real schools, named above. It is not a standard.
The rules underneath the GPA
Three further conditions recur in the registrar pages:
- Residency hours. The honour is for work done at the degree-granting school. UMBC requires 60 graded hours earned at UMBC; UT Tyler requires 45 hours there, and states that credits earned by examination or on a Pass/Fail or CR/NC basis do not count toward the requirement. Transfer grades alone rarely carry a student to Latin honours.
- The whole degree counts. The calculation runs over the entire undergraduate record, which is why the arithmetic in how to calculate GPA, weighted by credit hours, is the arithmetic that decides it.
- Non-letter grades may sit outside it. Pass/Fail and audit grades are excluded or capped in the pages above, each under its own school’s wording.
When in the degree are Latin honours awarded?
At the end — they are a judgement on the finished degree, not a status held during it, and the timing has a catch. The determination is officially made after final grades are in. UMBC states it directly: students may be provisionally recognised at commencement, but the official determination happens after the ceremony, once final-semester grades have been submitted and calculated, and the diploma and the final official transcript are the documents that officially award it. UT Tyler runs the same split from the other side: honours in the commencement programme and cords on stage are based on the GPA through the term before graduation, with the recognition noted on transcript and diploma only after official verification of final grades. The programme at your ceremony is a forecast; the transcript is the fact — and the honour sits on both diploma and transcript, which is why it can be quoted for years afterwards.
Latin honours are not an honours programme
This is the distinction the similar names hide. Latin honours are a label calculated at graduation. At most schools you do not apply for them, join them or take special courses for them; the registrar’s formula reaches its verdict from your record. An honours programme — an honours college or a departmental honours track — is a curriculum you enter, usually early in the degree, with its own admission, designated courses and usually a thesis at the end.
The University of Rochester’s handbook keeps the two in separate sections of the same page: its Latin honours are awarded on the final cumulative GPA to set shares of the class (the top 2% summa, the next 10% magna, the next 20% cum laude), while its departmental honours programs are things a student is admitted to, requiring at least 12 credit hours in designated honours courses including an advanced seminar and the course in which a senior thesis or research project is completed. Harvard, unusually, braids the two together — its Latin honours rest partly on a departmental honours recommendation, which in its Government department requires a thesis — but that is one school’s design, not the general rule. So you can complete an honours programme and miss Latin honours if your final GPA falls short, and earn Latin honours without ever joining one. Neither is the British “honours degree,” where honours describes the classified degree itself (first class, upper second and so on) rather than a Latin label added to it.
How employers and graduate schools read them
Read honestly, a Latin honour does one job well: it compresses four years of grades into a phrase a stranger can parse in seconds. That makes it most useful where a stranger is doing the parsing — a first job application, an internship shortlist, a graduate school file — and steadily less central after that, as work experience becomes the record employers judge. List it on a resume in the education section, beside the degree it belongs to.
Two cautions follow. First, the phrase does not travel with its cutoff attached: a reader who knows the system reads it together with the school, the major and the GPA itself, not as a self-contained score. Second, the higher tiers read as stronger signals mainly because they are rarer at that school — the scarcity is the information. What no Latin honour does: substitute for prerequisites a programme names, outweigh a weak record in the field you are applying to, or stay the headline once you have years of work to show. It is genuine and permanent, but it is the opening line of a file, not the file.
Latin honours outside the United States
The three-tier ladder is primarily a United States system, used mainly for bachelor’s degrees and, in the US, also for the Juris Doctor; it is not the standard machinery of master’s or doctoral degrees, and most other countries classify degrees their own way. Where the Latin phrases appear elsewhere, they usually mean something narrower. The University of Birmingham’s Cum Laude pages are a documented British example: Birmingham — which says itself that cum laude is “primarily used in the USA and Canada” — used the phrase as a single epithet for roughly the top 10% of a cohort, with no magna or summa ladder at all, and even that scheme was suspended while under review for 2024/25. In Britain generally, the degree classification is stated in English, not Latin. A cum laude on a non-US credential must be read against that institution’s own definition; the American meaning cannot be assumed.
What does cum laude mean at your own college?
Only one document can answer that for you, so the method is short:
- Find your registrar’s Latin honours page or your catalog’s graduation section. Search your school’s name plus “Latin honors” and take the registrar or catalog result over every guide — including this one.
- Work out which machine your school runs. A published GPA table means a fixed band you can aim at today. A percentage of the class means the floor will be set by your graduating class; last year’s published cutoff, if your school posts one, is the best guide available.
- Check the conditions under the number — residency hours, which GPA is used, whether transfer or Pass/Fail credits count — before planning around the headline figure.
Frequently asked questions
What GPA do you need for cum laude? Your school’s, and only your school’s. Among the named registrars above, the published cum laude floor is 3.5 at UMBC, UT Tyler and UIC, 3.4 at West Virginia University, and — under percentile systems — 3.741 at Harvard and as high as 3.900 in some University of Maryland colleges in recent tables. No figure applies everywhere.
What does cum laude mean compared with magna and summa? It is the first of the three tiers: cum laude “with praise,” magna cum laude “with great honour,” summa cum laude “with highest honour,” in that ascending order. The difference is the level of the final record, measured by each school’s own GPA band or class slice.
Is cum laude a big deal? It is a real, permanent distinction, printed on the diploma and recorded on the transcript, certifying a final record well above the ordinary degree at your institution. Its weight varies with how selective your school’s cutoff is and how early in your career you are showing it — strongest on first applications, quieter once experience takes over.
Can graduate students earn cum laude? Generally, the ladder belongs to first degrees — bachelor’s degrees, and the Juris Doctor in the US. Master’s and doctoral programmes typically use their own awards and classifications instead.
Does cum laude mean I was in an honours programme? No. Latin honours are calculated from your final record at graduation; an honours programme is a separate curriculum with its own admission, honours courses and usually a thesis. Students can hold either without the other, or both.
My GPA is 3.5. Have I graduated cum laude? At a fixed-band school whose floor is 3.5, if you also meet its residency and credit conditions, yes. At a percentile school, a 3.5 may fall outside the honoured slice entirely — Harvard’s floor for May 2026 was 3.741. What does cum laude mean in your case is a question your registrar’s page, not a general table, decides.
This article is general information about Latin honours in US bachelor’s degrees, based on the registrar and honours pages linked above and checked in November 2026. Thresholds and residency rules are set by each institution and change over time; your own registrar’s rule is the one that applies to your degree.