Office of International Programs

Summer courses not offered by a Princeton program must be preapproved if you wish to receive Princeton credit.

If you wish to take a summer course for Princeton credit, you must complete the Approval Form for a Course Taken at Another Institution, which is available at all residential colleges and in the Office of International Programs. As part of the approval process, the course description/syllabus must be reviewed and approved by the relevant departmental representative and the Office of International Programs. Courses that are preapproved must be passed with a grade of C or better to qualify for credit.

The guidelines for approval are as follows:

1. The course must be offered by an accredited four-year institution that will provide a transcript.
2. A one-term course must meet for a minimum of four weeks (five weeks or more is preferable) and have at least 30 contact hours. Language courses and courses intended to fulfill an ST with lab must meet 60 hours. In the case of an ST course, 30 hours of laboratory must be included in the 60 hours. Visual arts courses require 60 contact hours, with some exceptions.
3. The content of an elective course should fit within the general range of course offerings in a Princeton department. In the cases of courses proposed as substitutes for prerequisites or required courses in a Princeton department, the content should be substantially similar.
4. The departmental representative may request information about the course beyond the catalog description, such as the reading list or titles of required texts, and the kinds of examinations, reports, lab projects, or papers used to test the student’s mastery of the course material.
5. Credit will be granted for one 100-level foreign language course only if you place out of all 100-level language courses on the basis of the departmental placement exam in that language. If you begin a language abroad and place out of the 101-102 level, you can, of course, move on to the 105 or 107 level (depending on whether the sequence is three or four terms in length), but you will not receive Princeton course credit.