Pre-Taken Courses

Pre-taken modules

Notice: With effect from Semester 1, AY2022/2023, NUS undergraduate Engineering students will not be allowed to pre-take courses for their Masters by coursework candidatures. Please refer to the double counting policy instead as stated here.

NUS BEng degree holders with approved pre-taken courses taken prior to Semester 1, AY2022/2023 during their undergraduate candidature may apply to transfer their credits to their current graduate studies in NUS. These pre-taken module(s) should be graduate courses which the student’s Department allows to be counted towards the graduate degree being pursued and declared not to be included in their Bachelor’s degree CAP computation during their undergraduate study.

Courses that are pre-taken should have been taken less than 5 years prior to admission into the current programme and must not have been counted towards their Bachelor’s degree requirements.

An application for transfer of credits must be submitted to CDE Office of Graduate Programmes (OGP) within the first two instructional weeks of the semester upon enrolment into their new candidature. The completed application form should be accompanied by a copy of the Bachelor degree academic transcript of records indicating the pre-taken module(s) for credit transfer.

Upon approval, the pre-taken courses and grades will be transferred to the student’s graduate programme of study and will be included in the student’s Grade Point Average (GPA) computation.

What are pre-taken courses?

These are courses, generally 5000 and 6000 level courses taken during NUS BEng candidature, declared not to be computed as requirements for BEng degree but for a subsequent NUS Engineering graduate degree (can be either for a MSc coursework or research programme (i.e. MEng or PhD)).

In other words, the NUS BEng student takes a module during his BEng prior to gaining admission to a NUS Engineering Graduate Programme. The student needs to ascertain that the pre-taken module is relevant to the specific graduate engineering degree(s) for which he intends to gain admission to. In addition, he has to ensure that he is able to meet the admission requirements of the programme of study subsequently.

Semester 2, AY2021/2022 is the last semester students were allowed to pre-take courses during their BEng degree.

Does pre-taking couress imply that a student is guaranteed admission to a graduate programme at NUS?

Why then the need to pre-take courses?

The main advantage is, it expedites the completion of their graduate study (be it PhD or MEng or MSc). In addition, students can also get some feel of graduate study and its courses before actually registering for their graduate programme of interest.

Assuming the student pre-takes five courses and all are approved for transfer to his graduate programme of study then, he has the following options:

BEng + can complete 1 semester of full-time MSc study instead of 1 to 1½ yr
BEng + can complete 1 year of part-time MSc study instead of 2 or 2½ yrs

Students can pre-take courses during their BEng candidature as long as they fulfill the necessary pre-requisite(s) for the module to be taken. Since the validity period of the pre-taken courses is five years, the students can save these for transfer to the graduate degree (PhD, MEng, or MSc) later when they register for their graduate programme of study.

Moreover, since he is reading his BEng, he could continue his momentum of studying by pre-taking the relevant courses.

How many pre-taken courses can be counted?

What modules are considered relevant courses?

The pre-taken module(s) must be of relevance for the intended graduate degree (for it to be counted for a MSc, MEng or PhD degree regardless of whether student intend to pursue the graduate degree on a full-time or part-time basis).

Particularly, if the student is interested to pursue a research degree of MEng or PhD or MSc and intend to use their pre-taken courses to count towards fulfilling the requirements, they should consult the Department’s (which they intend to gain admission to) Programme Manager on the matter of relevance of the courses they are pre-taking. It is important to ascertain that their plans to pre-take the courses eventually can fit in and count towards the requirements, especially for a subsequent research degree. This is so because graduate students have different backgrounds and shall be working on different areas of research. Pre-taken courses which are not relevant to the area of research will not be accepted for counting towards the requirements of the graduate degree.

The pre-taken courses are generally expected to be 5000 level or 6000 level courses.

Seminar courses cannot be pre-taken.

What is the validity period of the pre-taken courses?

The validity of period for these pre-taken courses to be considered for inclusion for graduate degree is five years upon taking the module. If a student takes the pre-taken module in Semester I, 2014/15, then the module’s validity period to be counted is not later than Semester 2, 2018/19. In other words, he must be a graduate engineering student by Semester 2, 2018/19 for the courses to be valid for transfer for his graduate degree. However, do apply for your graduate study earlier as some candidates may fail to gain admission during their first attempt of application (e.g. supervisor may be unable to supervise any more students or scholarships are not available etc)