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Applying Transfer Courses to Major/Minor Requirements

How to petition to apply a transferred course to your philosophy requirements

 

  1. Download the petition from here.
  2. Fill out your personal information and select "Departmental Exception"
  3. In the "Request" section, state explicitly which course you have taken elsewhere (course number and title) and which philosophy course at UC San Diego you would like it to replace (course number and title): “I want course PHIL XYZ from [name of community college or other four-year university] to replace course PHIL ABC at UC San Diego. 
Note that the transfer course you are hoping to apply to your philosophy requirements must be comparable to a course offered in the philosophy department at UC San Diego.  This means that the course must cover similar content and have similar assignments.  
You must also specify which requirement you would like satisfied with the course replacement (e.g. major elective or core class, class for minor, GE for a college, etc).  For instance, if you are minoring in philosophy, you might state you want the course to count toward one of your five upper-division course requirements.  Alternatively, if you are majoring in philosophy, you might say you want the course to fulfill an area requirement or an elective.

-You can see a list of our courses with a brief description here.
-If you are wondering about the specific content of a UC San Diego philosophy course, you can usually find a syllabus of a past course in our archives here.

  1. In the "Reason for Request" section, explain why the course you took is comparable in content to the course you are replacing. For instance, are the readings comparable? Are the assignments comparable? Is the subject matter comparable?
  2. Save the petition as a PDF. Combine the petition with the course syllabus. The syllabus must be the actual syllabus that was used in the class you took and not merely a course description. The syllabus must also list readings and details about assignments, as well as due dates.
  3. Name the petition as a pdf using the following convention: latename_firstname_PTN_Coursenumberoftransfercourse_replacing_coursenumberofUCSDcourse.pdf
  4. Finally, send the combined pdf (petition and a syllabus) of the course to philadvising-g@ucsd.edu. 

 

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

*Petitions are not accepted for PHIL 110, 111, or 112.

*Note that each course requires its own petition.

*Courses petitioned in from community colleges only replace lower-division courses at UC San Diego.  Minors can have a maximum of two lower-division courses applied to their requirements.  Majors can have a maximum of three lower-division courses applied to their requirements, though one of these three lower-division courses must be Phil 10: Introduction to Logic

*If you are petitioning to replace PHIL 10: Introduction to Logic, the transfer course must be a formal symbolic logic course. You can see two recent PHIL 10 syllabi here: PHIL 10 Syllabus 2023, PHIL 10 Syllabus 2024.  Petitions for informal critical thinking courses to replace PHIL 10: Introduction to Logic will not be approved.

*Once the petition is approved or rejected by the department, we will make note of the final status in your VAC account. If the petition is approved, we will add the course replacement to your audit prior to notification.