Hello! I’ll be a first year student soon and I was look at the breadth requirements page and I don’t get what any of it means? FCEs? 100 series? 300+ series? What??
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hi!
welcome to u of t and the annoying and confusing world of degree requirements!
basically, you need 20 FCE (full course equivalents, which means you could take 20 full year courses, 40 half year courses, or any mix as long as it adds up to 20 full course equivalents) to graduate. within those 20 credits, there are certain requirements that you need to fulfill. according to this, you need to have at least 6.0 FCE of 300/400-level courses with at least 1.0 400 series, and no more than 6.0 100-level courses.
but what does this all mean!??!
the “level” of a course denotes what year that course is meant to be taken in. 100 being first year, 200 being second year, etc. you can tell what “level” a course is from the first number in the course code. for example, ENG140 is a first year or 100- level course. of course, these levels are all suggested and oftentimes upper year students take a lower level course in order to complete requirements. as long as you don’t go over the max of 6.0 100-level courses and as long as you take at least 6.0 300+ level courses, you’ll be good!
this brings us to the elusive breadth requirement. the breadth requirement is the university’s way of making sure that we turn out somewhat well-rounded. there are 5 “categories”, all corresponding to a different area of study. you need to complete 1.0 FCE in 4/5 categories or 1.0 FCE in 3/5 categories and than 0.5 FCE in the remaining two categories. for the most part, whatever program you’re interested in will fulfill at least 2 or 3 of the categories, so you just need to look at completing the other 2 or 3. though a lot of students decide to get their breadth requirement out of the way in first year, it doesn’t really matter when you do it, as long as they’re done before you graduate.
i hope this helps! i know this is a lot and can be really confusing. don’t hesitate to reach out to your college registrar to set up an academic advising session just to figure some stuff out. it can be really helpful.
see you on campus in september!
xoxo,
aska