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Monday, June 21, 2010

Will this blog post fulfill your requirement?

We receive a LOT of questions from prospective students, wondering if we have a list of approved courses for a particular college.We realize there is a lot of anxiety as to whether particular courses fulfill our academic requirements.

To make it easy, let's break colleges/universities into 3 groups:
  1. California public colleges/universities (community college, California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC): Approved courses can be found on the ASSIST website
  2. California private colleges/universities: We have course lists for approximately 50 private schools in California. Visit our California private colleges/universities page to see if your school is included!
  3. Out-of-State colleges/universities: We have course lists for approximately 400 out-of-state colleges. Visit our Out-of-state colleges/universities page to see if your school is included! 
As you can imagine, with the volume of applications we receive, we are no longer able to update or create new Approved Course Lists for applicants entering the initial stage of our admissions process. Instead, we ask that prospective students use their best professional judgment to determine whether completed/in-progress/planned coursework meets our academic prerequisite requirements. In order to assist you, we have provided detailed information on our website to help you determine what courses are acceptable in meeting our requirements.

Please visit our web page for more information on Academic Prerequisites.

Also on our website is information related to Advanced Placement (AP) scores.

Please keep in mind that our academic prerequisites are fairly easy to determine. For the most part, we align our requirements with a pre-med/health track. It’s not our intent to require obscure or unique courses to fulfill our requirements.

When submitting your application, you should make your best professional judgment in completing UCSF’s Supplemental Application  (which asks you to list courses that fulfill our requirements.) We will conduct a complete academic review of those individuals who are admitted into the program. At that time we will determine whether specific courses satisfy our requirements.
 

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Is there an expiration date on the pre-req courses? I took calculus ten years ago. Do I need to retake calculus?

Joel W. Gonzales said...

There is no expiration date on prerequisite requirements. However, we ask ourselves "Is this applicant prepared to handle the rigors of our curriculum?" Sometimes, an applicant would need to take refresher courses or retake those course in order to prove they are academically prepared to hit the ground running should they be admitted into the program.

Anonymous said...

Is it recommended to take prerequisite courses at a four-year university? Is it "frowned upon" to take pre-reqs at a community college?

Joel W. Gonzales said...

Every applicant travels a different academic path. We look at each applicant independently. What if someone wasn't able to go to a four-year university -- should they be penalized? Isn't a community college student (who has done extremely well academically) more prepared to handle a doctoral-level curriculum than a four-year university student who has struggled with his/her coursework? Just things to think about....

Andy said...

For the AP credits towards the Pharm requisites, is it necessary for the undergraduate institution where we take our other pre-req courses to accept them? For example, the University of Florida only accepts a maximum of 45 AP credits, so if I choose those 45 AP credits, is it possible for me to use any of my other AP credits to cover the pre-pharm prerequisites?

Joel W. Gonzales said...

Andy: We evaluate AP cores independently of how your undergraduate institution may have evaluated or considered them. Our AP web page illustrates how your scores can be applied to our prerequisite requirements.

Michelle said...

I see some SUNY schools listed on the out-of-state college approved course list. Most SUNY schools have very similar course descriptions. Can I assume one that is not listed will also be accepted?

Joel W. Gonzales said...

Yes, Michelle. If we don't have a particular school on file, it just means that we were never asked to create a course list (back in the days when we received requests.) Since we stopped creating new ones, we've added more information on our webpage to help applicants kind of figure out what types of courses fulfill our requirements.

Anonymous said...

Hi there, what if I have never taken a college economics course? Are there any substitutions? Or will admissions be willing to omit this small portion of applying? Or are they willing to take into account some “outside economic experience”? Also instead of public speaking, I’ve taken small group communications. Will that work? Thanks

Joel W. Gonzales said...

Hello Anonymous. For specific questions regarding prerequisite requirements, you should contact our office.

 
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