amcas course classification--english

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cal2012

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For people who've applied before...did you ever have any problems classifying your interdisciplinary courses. I'm asking because one of the classes I'm trying to use to fulfill the english prereq was not actually offered through the english department. It's actually from my 'college' department, the liberal arts one. It fulfills the 'reading and comprehension' requirement my university has, which basically amounts to the writing requirement that everyone in my college needs to fulfill to graduate. The syllabus is also pretty explicit on this and should give me some support if my classifying this class as 'english' was challenged. This is still kind of stressing me out though, since without it it won't be possible for me to complete all my english prereqs before applying june 2011.

so, overall...do you think this will be a big issue (the course title is 'western civilization')? And if it probably will be, what will this mean in terms of my application? I checked up on schools I'm thinking of applying to, and most don't require that all prereqs be done by time of application (and I could just take a summer english course and put it on amcas as 'in progress'), but I've also heard of applications being put on hold until english grades are turned in...

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For people who've applied before...did you ever have any problems classifying your interdisciplinary courses. I'm asking because one of the classes I'm trying to use to fulfill the english prereq was not actually offered through the english department. It's actually from my 'college' department, the liberal arts one. It fulfills the 'reading and comprehension' requirement my university has, which basically amounts to the writing requirement that everyone in my college needs to fulfill to graduate. The syllabus is also pretty explicit on this and should give me some support if my classifying this class as 'english' was challenged. This is still kind of stressing me out though, since without it it won't be possible for me to complete all my english prereqs before applying june 2011.

so, overall...do you think this will be a big issue (the course title is 'western civilization')? And if it probably will be, what will this mean in terms of my application? I checked up on schools I'm thinking of applying to, and most don't require that all prereqs be done by time of application (and I could just take a summer english course and put it on amcas as 'in progress'), but I've also heard of applications being put on hold until english grades are turned in...

Yes, the English requirements are often difficult when considering writing-intensive humanities courses. Unfortunately, when faced with the specifics of course designations, whether a class meets an explicit pre-requisite requirement or not often depends on each individual institution.

I would think that from the way you describe the course, it may in fact be applicable to meeting an English requirement, but again, it depends on the school and how particular they are with prefixes/departments.

The best thing to do would be to ask the admissions staff at schools you're interested in directly. They deal with this sort of thing all the time (with all sorts of class requirements, not just English). Last but not least, don't worry about it in the meantim; you've likely got a couple semesters left to meet the requirement before matriculation. Good luck :luck:
 
When I found out that UT-Galveston specifically states on their website that the upper-division writing requirement must be taught by the English department I was similarly frustrated. I'm a Texas resident and wanted to apply to every school in the state. My major (Neuroscience) gives me the option of taking either the recommended "Advanced Neuroscience Writing" class or taking "Technical Communication from the English department.

I was looking forward to the neuro writing class because it would be a lot more pertinent to me, but now I'm stuck taking the more general English dept class. Hopefully most schools would have accepted the neuro class, but I'm just gonna play it rather safe than sorry.
 
Also...keep in mind, the schools that have these requirements usually ask you to list which classes you think fulfilled them on the secondary. For a lot of schools you will have a chance to plead your case, even if it is not on the AMCAS application.
 
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