I come from a place where no such idea exist in universities, you just choose your course, maybe with a few chosen exams, but that’s it.
Do you have to choose from specific exam lists?
Are you forced to have a minor in every case?
Is there a credit system for exams (i.e. 3 credits exams with less workload then a 9 credits exam?)
Thank you!
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You choose a specialization and then your courses aim to get you education in that area, with general education courses thrown in. So if you want an engineering degree, most of your classes will focus on that, such as math and science, but you will also take basic courses in literature, social science, etx
there are course requirements. you have to schedule courses that count toward your major in addition to any required general education courses (gen eds).
minors are optional. they work the same way. completing a certain set of courses will amount to a minor. but, as the name suggests, there are fewer courses required for a minor than a major.
You take your gen ed courses for two years then select your major by your third year.
What degree subject you are pursuing determines your major. I think that I had to have 30 credits just in my specialization and a minor would have required 9 credits just in that subject area. There were also department requirements as well as general education requirements. Most bachelor degrees are around 120 credits total.
A “major” consists of a defined set of courses you must take, plus some you get to choose (“electives”). You do not have to choose a minor.
You don’t get to pick and choose individual classes or which exams you will take (EDIT: see clarification at bottom). Exams are tied directly to a class, they’re not independent; the exception might be if there’s a prerequisite (prior required class) that you can take an exam on to “test out” and show you understand the material without having to take the prerequisite.
> a place where no such idea exist in universities, you just choose your course, maybe with a few chosen exams
That would make for a really ill-defined and “mushy” degree. Do you get to name your degree? How does a potential employer or subsequent higher-level degree gauge what you studied? Do they look at the entire list and each individual class?
EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: By saying “You don’t get to pick and choose individual classes or which exams you will take,” I do not mean there are no class choices *within a major*, I mean that you cannot take whatever random class that’s available at a university and come up with a degree from that mishmash.
>How do major/minors works in US universities?
A major is a list of courses, done after you get your two-year degree (though course prerequirements may be done during your two-year). A minor is what you get when you take other classes as well, though not enough to get a full degree. Usually around three to four classes in a subject area which is not your major, again from a list
>Are you forced to have a minor in every case
It’s entirely optional, but you don’t get a minor without graduating.
>Is there a credit system for exams (i.e. 3 credits exams with less workload then a 9 credits exam?)
Exams don’t have credits themselves, they’re all from the courses. The models I’ve seen have been base-5, where a standard full course is five credits and easier classes are less, and base-3, which is the same thing but a full course is three. The number of credits a course is worth comes down to the perceived hours of work the course – most of my classes in computer science were five credits, but I took a pedagogy course where we taught students in elementary school how to code, and that was worth 2 credits, because the workload was considered lesser
Think of the minor as a secondary degree. Students are encouraged to pick a minor that either supplements their major or a fall back option if a career with their major doesnt work out
It will vary by college, so I would recommend choosing a random major, a random university and googling what that university requires of that major. Most of the time, but not always, you won’t even know for certain what major you want when you enter college, but by like your third or so year you’ll have to officially declare. Each major will have a few classes it requires of you and then beyond that a set number of classes you have to take which you can choose from a set of electives. In my experience at least, it’s about a 50-50 split between major courses and general education requirements.
It sounds like you come from a system where you earn your degree by passing a series of specialized exams.
The American system is very different. You earn your degree by acquiring roughly 120 credit hours. Your grade is based participating on classes and doing coursework. There are tests and projects, but there may not be an end-of-course exam, or it may be optional.
Individual schools will have different requirements, and different departments may have different requirements, but a typical course of study would be 15 hours/semester = 2 semesters/year. 120 hours total.
Your General Education requirement – 60 hours of lower-level coursework distributed across all areas of study – math, science, history, art, languages, literature, business, physical education.
Your major – 30 or more hours specialized upper-level coursework.
The remaining 30 or so hours are electives. If you choose to earn a minor, one-third to one-half of these hours will go to upper-level coursework in a different field than your major.
As with everything American, all programs are individual, all schools make their rules within the general framework, except for a few schools who reject the framework entirely.
The exam system doesn’t exist here like in other countries. Colleges and universities have exams in each class at the end of the term, but in most cases that exam only accounts for a portion of your grade. A lot of times you can fail the final exam but still pass the class. Passing the class is what counts for earning a degree.
Sitting for comprehensive exams to get a degree are much less common. I did do it for my Masters degree (library science), but I don’t know anyone else who did that in school. Instead we tend to have licensing exams for some professions (law, accounting, actuaries, nursing, etc), which are taken after you’ve earned your degree. This can vary a little bit state to state. Librarians are licensed in some states but not others.
>I come from a place where no such idea exist in universities, you just choose your course, maybe with a few chosen exams, but that’s it.
I find it highly unlikely you have no form of a major or mostly set course of study to earn a degree.
Your major is the field you are getting your degree in. Usually, there will be some flexibility in exactly what classes you take, and some majors will have different tracks (different specialties within the same field).
A minor will be a different field. To complete a minor, you only take a handful of classes. Enough to get a firm foundation in the topic.
The result is that you have your field that you’re specialized in and your field(s) that you just have a firm foundation in. Very useful if you end up in a job where your primarily using the skills from one field but interacting with another field a lot. For example, my Major was in Wildlife Biology with a Minor in Geography. Both were useful when I worked in habit restoration and was coordinating with surveyors a lot. If I had done a minor in Engineering, it would have been simularly useful.
Your major defines what purpose your degree serves.
In my case, it was Computer Science, critical to a job as a software engineer. This meant that I had 15ish directly relevant courses like C, Algorithms, Cryptography, and Computer Graphics. I could have theoretically tested out of some of them, but not all.
My university also decreed that we had to take some non-CS courses both because they were useful (such as a number of advanced mathematics courses) or to round out our knowledge of the sciences in general. We also had a “Culture” category that I fulfilled by testing out of Spanish.
Within my major we had official specialties that required particular courses within the department, though not every major has that.
There are some people that double major at the cost of a significant increase in course load. I had a friend that did CS and Actuarial Sciences. He now works for Google.
As for minors, they are supplemental areas of study.
For my degree, we were restricted from getting a math minor because it was essentially free with how much math we already had to take for a CS major. I opted for two minors. One required 8 courses, the other required 9.
There’s not as heavy focus on exams as you seem to be implying.
In the US, a college degree usually has a very well rounded course of studies. So even if you’re going to school for say, Engineering, you’ll still have a few courses in literature and math, etc.
So a “major” is a defined series of courses centered around a certain field of study. If you had a major in Biology for example, that means that throughout your years of college, the bulk of your courses were focused on Biology and related subjects.
Yes you usually have to choose a major. You don’t usually need a minor.
It’s a little different when you’re aiming for a specific job that requires certain certifications (like teacher, doctor, lawyer etc).
Seconding most of this about the credits etc, but I’ll also add that a key difference between US universities and those in other countries is that you don’t apply directly into a major here. When you apply to college, you’ll likely specify an intended major or program. But nobody will hold you to this until you have to officially declare your major, usually during or after your 2nd year of college. More focus early on is placed on exploration and fulfilling core requirements.
The one principal exception is that some universities have different undergrad schools that you’d apply right into and commit to. Even still, these universities almost always have a “arts and sciences” option for people who don’t want to commit to engineering or premed or art right away.
American education is not as exam focused as your system. We value a holistic evaluation of student knowledge so we entrust the teacher with doing that evaluation how they think is best.