I was in the honors program at my State U and indeed, in that program, you do take all your core curriculum classes together as a cohort. They admitted only about 120 kids per year and we divided into small discussion-based classes with fellow honors students in the 60 "core" program hours.

We were always taught by actual professors, not TAs, in the program and the core hours were in literature, history, philosophy, math, science and economics and two colloquium classes. Outside of our core hours we were free to design any degree plan we wanted, within certain broad requirements. Our offical major was the honors program so we coud specialize in one area of or explore with our other hours, outside foreign language and civics requirements. It was a great educational experience.