MAT 1275 College Algebra & Trigonometry

Due Monday, October 2

This week’s assignment is similar to last week’s, where you looked up what the math requirements for your degree are. This week we’ll focus on a different requirement: the flexible common core, which is part of the general education requirement.

Flexible Core Courses

The flexible common core (sometimes called just flexible core) is actually a set of five or six requirements that every student must satisfy, though the way students satisfy them vary from major to major.

The flexible core consists of a number of courses that have been divided among the five flexible core categories:

1. World Cultures & Global Issues
2. US Experience in its Diversity
3. Individual and Society
4. Creative Expression
5. Scientific World

You can see the full list of courses that have been designated as Flexible Core here (click the tabs along the top to see the courses in each of the five categories).

Flexible Core Requirements

The basic requirement is that each student must take at least one course from each of the five categories and at least two courses from one of the categories (for a total of six courses). The lucky part is that some of the program requirements for your major will also satisfy a flexible core requirement; we say that these courses can perform “double duty” since they meet more than one requirement at the same time.

For example, when you check the degree requirements in the academic catalog for a computer science student, you’ll see that MAT 1372 or MAT 2572 are recommended to meet the Scientific world requirement. Since either of these courses is also a program requirement, they can perform double duty. For the other Flexible Core categories, the computer science student can take any of the courses on the corresponding lists.

Students often take their flexible core requirements early in their degree. A number of flexible core courses do not have prerequisites.

How do you know what requirement a course is satisfying?

It is tempting to rely on DegreeWorks to tell you which of your requirements have been satisfied by which courses, but it isn’t always accurate. It’s better to check for yourself.

Log into CUNYFirst and open up a copy of your transcript. Even if this is your first semester at CityTech, you’ll already have a transcript that lists the courses you are currently taking and which requirements they are satisfying.

This week’s assignment

For this week’s assignment you will write a short comment on this post. List all the Flexible Core courses from your transcript (those you already have credit for an those in progress). Also state which of the five categories each course comes from.

If you haven’t taken any flexible core courses yet, check the program requirements in the academic catalog to check if there are any double-duty courses that you can take next semester (reminder, here’s how you found your program requirements last week).

For example, the student with the transcript in the screenshot above would comment, “I am currently taking HIS 1110, which satisfies the USED requirement.”