Awards

Dijkstra Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement

This award generally recognizes the single student with top academic performance across all computer science degrees. Selection is based on the GPA in all major courses and election by department faculty. The award is named for Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002), a Dutch computer scientist whose 1968 letter to Communications of the ACM articulated the need for a new programming paradigm that became “structured programming.”

Turing High Achievement Award

This award is typically given to the top graduating student in each specialization area within computer science. Selection is by the election of department faculty from among those with the highest GPAs in computer science courses. The award is named for Alan M. Turing (1912–1954), a British mathematician and logician who made wide contributions to several areas which would later be named computer science. He created the Turing Machine and the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.

Departmental Honors

Outstanding students earn departmental honors by demonstrating top scholastic and academic performance in the undergraduate degree program. A student whose GPA in all major courses is at least 3.4 may qualify by completing six additional credits of 300-level or graduate-level computer science electives with a grade of B or higher.

Grace Murray Hopper Service and Leadership Award

This award recognizes extraordinary student leadership in the department, university, and the computer science profession. Selection is by department faculty election. The award is named for Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), a remarkable woman and early pathfinder in computer science. She grandly rose to the challenges of programming the first computers and is responsible for the first compiler.

Note:  Where GPA computations are used as part of determining awards, the GPAs are generally computed during the semester of graduation, and the major GPA is generally considered unusable if more than half the major credits have not been graded (in progress or transferred without a grade).