The university will grant degrees to 615 undergraduate and 217 graduate students during the 2018 commencement ceremonies Saturday in Moody Coliseum.
An 11 a.m. ceremony will honor graduates from the College of Biblical Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences. The second ceremony starts at 3 p.m. and will honor graduates from the College of Business Administration, the College of Education and Human Services and the School of Nursing. A reception for graduates and their guests will take place in the mall area south of Moody after each graduation.
Of the 615 undergraduate students in the commencement, 94 will graduate summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.9-4.0, which is a 24-student increase from last year. Seventy-two students will graduate magna cum laude with a GPA of 3.75-3.89, and 77 will graduate cum laude with a GPA of 3.6-3.74.
With 47 graduates, psychology is the largest major in the class of undergraduates, which is a 10-student increase from last year. Jessica Nguyen, adjunct professor of psychology, said psychology is not an easy degree choice because of the large number of theories and experiments students must memorize and understand.
“It takes a certain amount of love,” Nguyen said. “We have always have an incredibly bright cohort of students furthering the world, but this is a really incredible class.”
Other larger majors include nursing, kinesiology, communication disorders and management.
About 500 undergraduates are from Texas, and other common home states are California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Tennessee. The most common countries represented among the 2018 grads are Germany, Honduras, China and Mexico.