A course is an academic activity which is recorded with a result on a student's academic history.  A passed course gives academic credit towards completing a degree, unless the course is marked Extra, and may help complete a program and/or a breadth requirement. The Faculty of Arts & Science offers full-credit”(1.0 credit) and half-credit (0.5 credit) courses. 

Elements of a Course

Below are the fields in the course description template. Links to existing courses as examples are included to help show how the template works. 

Course Code 

Course Title

Indicates the topic and theme of the course. Some courses may have a general title of a “special topics course” in the Academic Calendar but the actual course content varies year by year; in such a case, seek out the academic unit's or program’s website, or the Timetable offerings, to learn more about what will be offered. On the transcript, the full course titles normally appear, although some courses still list the abbreviated course title.

Types of Instruction (Lecture/Tutorial/Practical/Seminar Hours (L/T/P/S)) 

All courses comprise a certain number of hours dedicated to instruction. There are four types. Often courses may have more than one. 

• Lectures are standard in almost every course as the fundamental type of instruction, where the instructor will present course content to students. All instructors have individual styles and approaches to lectures. For example, some instructors may take questions differently or present slides/visual aids differently.
• Tutorials are smaller group meetings where students can discuss and ask questions about lecture material with either the instructor or (more often) a Teaching Assistant (TA). Tutorials may also be used for some kinds of evaluation, like small quizzes or to be assessed on a student’s participation in the course. Like practicals, tutorials always are part of a course that has either lectures or seminars (see below).
• Practicals involve students being able to learn and apply their learning hands-on, for example, laboratories (“labs”) for science courses. If a course has practicals, then it always has either lectures or seminars (see below).
• Seminars are a small-class experience, common for very advanced courses, where the in-class process is a combination of some lecturing mixed with structured class discussion and often student presentations. The Faculty also offers First-Year Foundation Seminars for newly admitted first-year students. 

In brackets after the title, the number of hours that students will spend in lecture (L), in tutorial (T), in practical sessions (P), or seminar (S) for the course are listed. These are most often a multiple of 12, as the term is 12 weeks in length.

Calendar Description

This paragraph highlights the course content and themes to be delivered in the course. The description will state anything special about the course, from special aspects of the class experience (for example, language of study or field work), to the intended audience of the course (for example, a science course intended for non-science students as an elective), to any special ancillary fees (for example, lab material).

Prerequisites, Co-requisites, Recommended Preparation

These fields indicate courses which a student must complete before taking the course in question (prerequisites), sometimes with a minimum grade, take at the same time or prior to this course (co-requisites), or that are suggested (recommended preparation). The academic units that offer a course can remove students who do not have needed prerequisites or corequisites. Students are responsible for reviewing this information for their course planning.

Exclusions

Some courses overlap in content. This can be because the same kind of material may be offered in the context of different areas of study (like introductory statistics), or because there may be certain similar course material that is offered at different levels of difficulty, or because some courses have content that used to be offered in an older and now retired course. When reading a course description, if a student sees a course listed under “exclusions” that includes a course they already have credit for, they should not normally take this course. Academic units can remove students who have course exclusions, and even if they choose not to, the new course will not count for degree credit and will be marked “Extra”.

Breadth Requirement

Almost all courses are categorized in terms of one of the five breadth requirement categories:

• 1 (Creative and Cultural Representations)
• 2 (Thought, Belief and Behaviour)
• 3 (Society and its Institutions)
• 4 (Living Things and Their Environment)
• 5 (Physical and Mathematical Universes)

Half-credit courses offer 0.5 credits towards only one of the categories; full-credit courses offer either 0.5 credits in two different categories, or 1.0 credit in one category.