G3.2 Minimum Credit Load for Residency and the Two-Course Rule

Graduate students must meet the resident credit requirements as specified by the Graduate School. For more information on maintaining full-time enrollment, students should see the Graduate School’s Academic Policy on Enrollment Requirements: https://grad.wisc.edu/documents/enrollment-requirements/.

All MA students and all PhD students who have not yet passed their preliminary exams must take a minimum of two graduate-level courses in Spanish and/or Portuguese for credit each semester, exclusive of independent reading courses. Courses cross-listed with Spanish and Portuguese and having a Spanish or Portuguese course number count toward the minimum.

There are three exceptions to the “two-course rule”:

1. In the last semester before taking the preliminary examination, a doctoral student may count an independent reading (899) designed to work toward the dissertation proposal as one of the two courses, as long as another course is taken in the department. This exception may only apply once, even in the case that the preliminary examination is postponed.
2. Students may count as exceptions up to three courses taken toward their PhD minor. Every time that students request this exemption, their advisor should indicate the selected minor course(s) in the advisor consent survey for that semester.
3. Students in the linguistics track are exempt from the minimum of two graduate-level courses in Spanish and/or Portuguese in the semesters when the department does not offer two courses in Spanish linguistics. (See the requirements and guidelines for the individual graduate programs for further details).

Audited courses do not count toward the two-course minimum requirement. If the two-course rule impedes the student’s progress toward completion of the degree, students may petition an exception, with the written support of their advisor. This regulation does not apply to students who have passed the PhD preliminary examination.

If this rule impedes a student’s progress toward completion of the degree, the student may petition the Graduate Studies Committee for exception, with the written support of the advisor. Advisors should make every effort to ensure that students begin from their first semester onward to meet requirements outside the department, e.g. in foreign languages and the minor, in order to avoid creating a bottleneck with this requirement in later semesters.

Students not enrolled in two courses in the department are considered not to be in good standing.