The Yale-NUS College has adopted the Latin honours system, a degree classification employed by the United States and many countries of continental Europe. The Singapore Management University (SMU) also uses this system.
The Latin honours uses Latin phrases to denote the level of distinction achieved. Notably, the system uses the phrases cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude, which mean “with honour”, “with great honour” and “with highest honour” respectively. For example, graduates from SMU have to achieve GPAs of 3.4, 3.6 and 3.8 respectively in order to qualify for the abovementioned Latin honours. A fourth distinction, egregia cum laude, “with outstanding honour”, has occasionally appeared in some American universities. The honours classification is distinct from the Postgraduate with Honours or Cum Honore degree — a continuation of an undergraduate Bachelor’s degree in the same field.
The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) both use the British honours system of first class, second-class upper, second-class lower and third class. In 2015, NUS renamed its first-class honours as honours with highest distinction, second-class upper honours as honours with distinction, second-class lower honours as honours with merit and third-class honours as honours.
Typically, employers are familiar with British and American degree classification systems, including Latin honours, but without knowledge of the specific criteria employed by each university, they have to judge their hires based on whether he or she is a local or overseas graduate, and the brand name of the university attended.
The Singapore civil service also pays close attention to the level of honours of its job applicants in deciding their pay grades.
Universities such as NUS and NTU grade students taking each module or course on a normal distribution bell curve in order to prevent grade inflation or deflation and maintain consistency of standards over time. This probability distribution is usually applied with some flexibility as university administrators are aware that different classes may have different proportions of bright students. The Yale-NUS College, SMU, SIT and SUSS currently do not use a bell curve system.