Science and technology area courses must include a laboratory component. Students who have two terms of advanced placement in science may elect to take one laboratory and one approved nonlaboratory science and technology course. A list of approved nonlaboratory ST courses is published each term in Course Offerings and is also available through the academic advisers, the directors of studies, and the academic deans. Student-initiated seminars, reading courses, and graduate courses do not fulfill distribution area requirements. A student may, for sound educational reasons and with the prior approval of the director of studies or an academic dean and the appropriate departmental representative, complete certain distribution courses at another college or university.
Students usually complete their distribution courses by the end of junior year.
Most undergraduates find that the distribution requirements are met simply through electing courses in a variety of departments and programs. Questions about the distribution areas should be discussed with the director of studies or an academic dean. Epistemology and Cognition. The requirement in epistemology and cognition introduces students to the critical study of the nature, sources, and bounds of human knowledge. While courses in other areas examine important modes of cognition or methods of inquiry in application to a particular subject matter, courses in this category take cognition itself as their subject matter, and explore its mechanisms, potential, and limitations from a wide variety of theoretical, historical, and empirical perspectives.