Plan your courses

Planning your courses

Once you’ve decided on the degree you want to study, you then need to choose the courses for your first year at university.

Some degrees are quite prescriptive about what to take, meaning your first year is mostly filled with compulsory core courses; but other degrees give you more flexibility about what courses to choose – but that means more decisions for you to make!

Most full-time students do 8 courses a year, so you need to think about different subjects of interest within your degree.

The following are available to help with your course planning:

• Attend a UC course planning session at your school if it has one
• Contact our Future Students team for one-on-one course planning advice in person, via phone or Zoom

Use these resources for guidance:

• Required courses for first year of Engineering chart
• Typical degree structure for Science
• Degree plans for Commerce majors
• Product Design sample degree plans and plans for conjoints with BCom and BSc
• Info on planning an Arts degree
• Guidance on other degrees

Courses and majors and minors

UC Terminology

Whichever degree you're considering, this video explains some key terms we’ll talk about in course planning.

• Courses are the ‘papers’ that make up your chosen degree qualification. Each course has a point value and you will be eligible to graduate in your chosen qualification when you have reached the required number of points. 
  Each course is identified by a unique course code made up of a four-letter abbreviation for the subject and a number (the first digit of which indicates the level of the course, eg: ECON104.)
  Students usually take 100-level courses in their first year, 200 level in their 2nd year and 300 level in their 3rd year.
• A typical first-year workload for a full-time student is around 120 points (7-8 courses for most degrees). One point equals ten hours study, so a 15-point course will require approximate 150 hours of study (or approx 10 hours a week). Time in lectures is only part of this workload – you need to put in many more hours in labs, tutorials, study groups, at the library and off-campus.
• Your major is the main subject area you will study throughout your Bachelor degree. You will need to complete a required number of 300-level courses to achieve this. A double major is when you complete these requirements for two different subjects within the same degree.
• Minors can increase the breadth of some degrees such as Arts, Commerce, Sport Coaching, Science or Youth and Community Leadership, as you can study an additional subject in some depth, usually for more than one year.