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Northwestern University

New Degree Requirements

New degree requirements for the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences are in effect for students who have matriculated after Spring Quarter 2023. Other students continue to follow the B.A. degree requirements that were in effect their quarter/year of matriculation.

For an overview you can see the new requirements:

Review of courses

Existing courses need to be assessed relative to the newly defined foundational disciplines, perspectives on power, justice and equity (overlays), or advanced expression requirements. Courses will be reviewed by the Curriculum Policies Committee or Curriculum Review Committee with respect to the descriptions and learning objectives. You can find this information summarized on the Learning Goals and Objectives handout, or refer to Approval Guidelines.

What to submit (preparing for submission)

Minimum required:

You can submit individual courses one at a time, or batches of courses up to 10 at a time to be reviewed together as long as they are to match the same degree requirement(s).

For guidance in developing or improving learning objectives see Weinberg College learning objectives information and also the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, Developing Learning Objectives

Optional additional documents:

Reminder: Departments and programs have internal governance structures in regards to undergraduate curriculum; please be sure your internal deliberations are complete before uploading information to the form.

Submission of information

Submission is via the New Requirements Form. Form tips:

Visit the NEW REQUIREMENTS FORM

After submission

You can expect follow-up within a week if there is a failure in the document-upload process or if there seems to be a missing component such that the materials are not ready for review. Otherwise, note that courses will not necessarily be reviewed in the order received so please be patient. It will be more efficient for the curriculum committees to review courses with similar characteristics in batches and establishing a batch (especially at first) may take some time.

Approvals will be summarized quarterly under Curriculum Committee Actions and approvals will be updated more frequently on the website. For proposals that are not approved or only partially approved you will receive an email follow-up so you can evaluate if you want to resubmit (for example after revising the course).

For this first, intense phase you will NOT need to submit a Changes to Existing Courses Form to the Office of the Registrar. The RO staff will be receiving information from the Assistant Dean for Curriculum and Assessment while they also set up the new programming required to record this new information.

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