12 distinct credits,  current student,  life science,  programs

all my homies hate the 12 distinct credits rule

hi! i ended up switching programs after first year so figuring out requirements has been crazy. i’m aiming for a human bio major with two minors, psych and imm. the issue is that the immunology minor doesn’t have a lot of required classes and almost all of the listed ones are also in the hmb program. how does this work with the distinct courses thing? thank you for any help!


hey there,

ok, maybe “hate” is too harsh a word but let’s face it, it’s just confusing.

i also wanna preface this post by saying i am so sorry for the late response… the blog post backlog has been real, but hopefully this still helps someone out there :’)

so anyway, back to that pesky 12 distinct credits rule. the whole idea is that your program requirements should add up to at least 12 different FCEs. for example, the human bio major is 8.0 FCEs. if all of the 4.0 FCEs in your imm minor end up overlapping with human bio, then you’d need to make sure to take 4.0 FCEs in your psych minor that are all distinct from your human bio/imm courses — that would get you to 12 distinct credits.

of course, psych probably also overlaps with human bio/imm/other life sci programs, so it might not be possible to get 12 distinct credits just by meeting the minimum requirements of the programs. for example, even if you take your 8.0 FCEs for human bio and they all overlap with imm, you could take a few more eligible hmb or imm courses beyond the overlapping ones in order to fulfill 12 distinct FCEs for your program courses. alternatively, you could try to enrol in a different combination of programs to make it easier to get those distinct credits.

i know this all sounds incredibly convoluted, which is probably why utsc has a whole worksheet on the rule. personally, i’ve just planned things out on degree explorer which helps to just lay out all your program courses so that you can count them all up and make sure that they add up to at least 12.0 FCEs total.

hope that helps!

aska

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