I’ve been looking through Stanford’s degree requirements, and I’m having difficulty figuring out approximately what percentage of courses, for most students, can be electives. If you’re a current student or recent grad, how much room is/was there in your four-year schedule for electives unrelated to your major or to fulfilling Gen Ed requirements?
Depends entirely on your major and how much AP credit you have.
You need to have a minimum of 180 units to graduate. Here are the units required for each major:
http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/undergraduatemajorunitreq/#text
As you can see, Political Science only requires 70 units, whereas Computer Science requires between 96 and 106 units. But these figures don’t consider AP credit:
https://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/registrar/students/ap-charts
If you’ve 5’d AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C, AP Chemistry, and a language AP test that Stanford accepts, then you’ve already lopped 35 units off of the requirements for the CS degree (slightly more than two quarters’ worth of coursework). Stanford will accept up to 45 units of AP/transfer credit, which is equivalent to about a year’s worth of coursework.
The difference between the units that are required for your major and the 180 units required to graduate are units that you can do lots of things with. You do need to fulfill your GenEd requirements, which we call the WAYS (https://undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/ways/ways), but you can also take random classes that interest you (many of these end up counting as WAYS), study abroad, work on a second major or a minor, and/or work on a graduate degree. As far as the last option is concerned, many Stanford students opt to stay on for a fifth year to get a master’s degree. The practice is called co-terming, and in order to finish the master’s in the fifth year, students typically need to have done some of the graduate coursework while still an undergraduate.
Here’s Stanford’s course catalog for this year:
http://explorecourses.stanford.edu/
And here are all requirements for all degrees:
Thanks, @aleaiactaest! I’d already looked through many of these pages before, but I still couldn’t figure out approximately how many courses would be completely unrestricted. Say, for instance, you’re a CS major with some AP credit and your CS courses would take 100 units (just for instance), minus maybe 27 units of AP credit, leaving 73 units. 180 minus 73 leaves 107 units; if you have to take 11 WAYS courses at, say, 4 units per course, that leaves 63 units free, which would seem to be approximately 16 unrestricted courses, or maybe a third of all the courses you’d take. Does that sound about right?
Yes, that does sound right, as it averages to slightly more than 1 unrestricted class per quarter. Among engineers, at least, it’s common to take two engineering class and a third class that is slightly less demanding so as not to overwork one’s self. In fact, the CS department strongly advises against taking more than 2 CS classes in any given quarter:
http://csmajor.stanford.edu/Courseload.shtml
Also, the School of Engineering has four-year plans online for each engineering major. They’re by no means binding, but give you a good idea of what class schedules will look like:
http://web.stanford.edu/group/ughb/cgi-bin/handbook/index.php/4-Year_Plans
Note that the buffer of the additional units also gives you time during your freshman year to shop around. Most of the majors require only two years to complete, with some engineering ones requiring three years. Therefore, each student typically has about one year’s worth of courses that are unrestricted.
Thanks very much, @aleaiactaest—this helps a lot!