tldr: Auditing courses does not fullfill 4 courses per semester requirement for co-op and for student health insurance
Auditing courses is a formal registration to participate in a course without being required to submit coursework nor write the final exams. However, this is not free and requires students to pay the same cost as any other course. The question one may ask is why? Auditing courses allows one to learn and gain full access to the course materials and resources as any other registered student. One could ask the instructor to informally audit a course but that is a different topic from what I want to talk about today.
Computer Science popularity has exploded in the past decade such that CarletonU no longers offers the option for students to enroll in a Computer Science minor and actively restricts students from taking any upper-year computer science courses as an elective. As a student who needs electives to fullfill the 4 courses per semester requirement to be eligible for Cooperative education and for student health insurance, I was considering auditing some upper-year Computer Science courses.
Auditing courses do not get included in your graduation requirement but as I already have an undergraduate degree, I do not need to do many courses. So I have to hunt down for electives despite having taken over 47 courses at the undergraduate level (most universities require students to take 40 courses to obtain a 4-year bachelor’s degree), I still have to take unnecessary courses.
After contacting the Cooperative education (coop pronounced as co-op) and student union, I learned that auditing courses do not fulfill the credit requirement. I am unsure why a student must take 4 courses per semester despite OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Plan) considers taking 3 courses per semester as a full-time student. At least in the case of student health insurance, there is a way to opt into the plan but you needed to know this before the deadline to opt into the insurance plan. I unfortunately, learned the hard way that I was not enrolled in student insurance. I did not realize the requirements were drastically different compared to my alma mater. The same applies to coop, which has so many restrictions and somewhat ridiculous requirements and suggestions compared to my alma mater. I was lucky to get a one-time exemption which required me to fill in a form to request an exemption which the co-op office was nice to accept (I luckily have a somewhat good experience with the co-op office but I know a lot of students who despise them).
Anyhow, if you were interested in auditing a course, you are required to do the following:
- Contact the professor for permission
- If the professor accepts your request, you need to send a form for the professor to fill-in
- Forward the form to the department who will give you a certain timeframe to enroll into the course on Central Carleton
Form: https://carleton.ca/registrar/registration/auditing-students/ (the form is at the bottom)
One may ask will the course appear in your transcript, the answer is it will but no grade will be associated with it. It will appear as AUD.
Aside: I do not know if I’ll have anything technical to write for this month. I do expect to release something a bit more interesting next month but it likely won’t be anything related to computers unfortunately. I have not have much time to explore anything outside of my studies lately and my work is related to teaching Mathematics.