You must take a departmental course in each of the three main divisions of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences: Arts & Humanities, Science & Engineering, and Social Sciences. Further information about the distribution requirement can be found on the Office of Undergraduate Education site.
You can determine whether a course will fulfill a distribution requirement by examining the course description on my.harvard. Courses can also be searched by divisional affiliation on my.harvard:
If a submission is about a single Gen Ed course, a student must have already completed the course.
If a submission is about more than one Gen Ed course, a student must have completed at least one of those courses. It is not required that a student must have completed more than one.
Students pursuing simultaneous enrollment in a Gen Ed course and a non-Gen Ed course must attend the Gen Ed course.
Gen Ed courses taken SEM/UEM in Spring 2020 will count towards Gen Ed requirements, but will not count against the limit of fulfilling one Gen Ed requirement with a course taken Pass/Fail.
Instructor permission is required to take a course Pass/Fail. Check the course syllabus to see if Pass/Fail is permitted or ask the course head. Pass/Fail Instructions are available for requesting a change in grading basis from letter-graded to Pass/Fail.
Courses are approved for the Program in General Education by the Standing Committee on General Education. Faculty interested in proposing a course for Gen Ed should consult the guidance for faculty.
Students cannot ordinarily petition courses to count for Gen Ed requirements.
We hope that most faculty know by now if their course either is or isn’t going to be part of the new program, but if you have any questions, you can either check the Gen Ed website or contact the Gen Ed office. We’d be happy to help.
The next step for Gen Ed will be to take ownership of the course’s catalog listing for continuity, as well as to track course enrollment and Q scores. The Gen Ed office may reach out you to ask that you grant us course catalog access to a departmental course that is being moved into Gen Ed.
It depends. The faculty member may wish for you to inactivate the course in the catalog, effectively “retiring” it, or they may wish to offer it as a departmental course. If they wish to offer it as a departmental course, please contact the Gen Ed office so that we may transfer ownership of the course catalog listing to your department.
No. Only courses explicitly designed for and approved for the new Gen Ed program (with GENED XXXX as a number) will count for General Education credit. This means that you should remove Gen Ed attributes from all departmental courses being offered beginning in Fall 2019. If you have any questions about how to remove Gen Ed attributes, please contact the FAS Registrar’s Office.
The outgoing Program in General education requires that students complete courses in eight different categories, but the new Gen Ed requires only four: Aesthetics & Culture; Ethics & Civics; Histories, Societies, Individuals; and Science & Technology in Society. In the new program, all courses have course codes that consist of “GENED” plus a four-digit number (e.g., GENED 1117). There will be no further use of the categories and course numbers you might be familiar with, such as AI, CB, SW or USW.
The Standing Committee on General Education, composed of faculty members, reviews course proposals, then communicates directly with faculty about whether or not the course is approved. Interested faculty can consult Proposing Courses.
No. It’s important to know that no courses were automatically accepted into the new program. Even Gen Ed courses taught in the current version of the program had to be resubmitted for consideration by the Standing Committee on General Education. This means that some courses were either not submitted by the faculty or not selected by the committee, so it’s important to make sure that all courses you think will be Gen Ed courses are actually staying Gen Ed courses. The Gen Ed office is happy to help you with any questions.
