That morning last week, Sofia Rivkin-Haas, 22, felt as if her heart were beating "3,000 times per minute."
The nattily dressed Swarthmore College honors student from Berkeley, Calif., was about to begin a barrage of 45-minute oral exams - all given by professors she had never met before.
The topics spanned Russian history to English lit.
"I know I'm going to talk about Stalin when I'm supposed to be talking about Shakespeare," worried a nerve-racked yet excited Rivkin-Haas.
At Swarthmore, the final tests for Rivkin-Haas and the 113 other senior honors students - who make up about 30 percent of the Class of 2009 - were given by a cadre of nearly 150 academic experts from universities, art galleries, hospitals, and other institutions around the world.
Swarthmore's program is the only one of its kind in the United States that makes such extensive use of outside examiners, experts say.
From as far away as the University of Geneva in Switzerland and as close as the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, the eclectic group of examiners come to Swarthmore for the week and meet one-on-one with the students whose written exams they have already evaluated.
They then determine whether the students, who will graduate along with the rest of Swarthmore's senior class Sunday, will receive honors, high honors, highest honors - or in a couple of cases no honors.
Rivkin-Haas' fate rested with four professors, from the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Kansas State, and the University of Vermont.
"I'm not aware of anything quite like that," said Robert Spurrier, secretary of the National Collegiate Honors Council and director of the honors college at Oklahoma State University. He likes the idea as long as examiners are prepared.
Indeed, the examiners review the syllabi and design questions for the written exams, which are vetted by Swarthmore faculty to be sure the material was covered in class.
The approach, started by Swarthmore's seventh president, Frank Aydelotte, in 1922, was modeled after the system at Oxford, where Aydelotte was a Rhodes scholar. At the time, Swarthmore was known more for football than academics, and Aydelotte wanted to change that, along with replacing big lectures with small-group, interactive teaching.
The idea? Swarthmore students should be able to withstand evaluation and discuss their fields with any expert in the world, said Craig Williamson, an English-literature professor and coordinator of the program.
The process is high-pressure and as ambitious as many graduate programs.
"It was the most intense thing I ever did until I got to the point of defending my doctorate," said Ethan Knapp, this year's head examiner, who was a high-honors grad in 1988. He's now an English professor at Ohio State.
Mark D. Schwartz, a Bryn Mawr attorney and 1975 honors grad, still has anxiety dreams.
"I'm running around campus," he said. "I can't find the examination room. I get there 40 minutes late. I open the blue book - and it's for a course I never had."
But the program was so rewarding that he encouraged his two sons to go to Swarthmore. Benjamin, now a presidential fellow, graduated with high honors, while Aaron, an economics major and biology minor, got highest honors this year.
Swarthmore professors say the process rattles them, too.
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