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Academic Advising

  General Student Academics | Major Advising |   FAQs

GENERAL STUDENT ACADEMICS
AXLE (for students entering before Fall 2025)

Please note that students entering in Fall 2025 and later will take the College Core.

 Other
MAJOR ADVISING 

A student’s faculty advisor in their major is an important part of their academic experience. The information below includes information and resources to support and guide you as you advise students.

Advising Timeline

All students are assigned an enrollment window, and you should hold your advising session before their window opens. If your advisee doesn’t respond to you until after their window has passed, still advise them as soon as possible but make sure they know that they will have to wait until Open Enrollment begins to enroll in classes.

Advising Sessions

Plan to meet with each advisee for 20-30 minutes. In your sessions, you may want to cover the following topics:

What have they already taken and what AXLE gaps remain?

What do they need to take to achieve class standing at the end of the year?

  • Junior standing = 4 semesters + 54 hours + ENGL 1100 + any-level W course + 1.9 cumulative GPA
  • Senior standing = 6 semesters + 84 hours + 2.0 cumulative GPA

What is an appropriate course load to achieve class standing?

Do they need to take a Writing course?

Do they need to complete the foreign language requirement?

Note that a student is placed on academic probation if:

  • They fail to make class standing (in which case they will be required to come to summer school to make up their deficiency).
  • They complete fewer than 12 credit hours per semester or earn less than a 1.5 GPA.
Major Requirements

All majors, both interdisciplinary and disciplinary, require 24 unique credit hours, regardless of overall number of hours required for the major. The remaining credit hours of a major may be double-counted toward other majors or minors, if allowed by the involved departments or programs. This policy applies only to majors and does not change the 15 unique credit hour rule in place for minors or rules for the 48 credit hour self-designed major.

 FAQs

 

A: Major adviser reassignments will need to come directly from your department. Please send notification of those changes to arts-sci-records@vanderbilt.edu.

A: Notification of a variance in major requirements must come directly from the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the major department.

A: Please direct your advisee to the Office of Undergraduate Education at arts-sci-records@vanderbilt.edu.

A: Your advisee will need to meet with the A&S Office of Undergraduate Education and submit a proposal to complete Summer Work Elsewhere for the dean’s approval. Once the dean has approved the courses, the student will be directed to the necessary departments for evaluation of transfer credit.

A: Yes. The Student Academics section of our website contains all of this information and much more, clearly organized by topic. For easy access, students may find the following specific pages helpful: majors & minors, enrollment and registration, and FAQs.

A: View the process students must follow to request a special course load.

A: View the process students must follow to audit a class.

A: View the process students must follow to enroll in a class Pass/Fail.

View the process students must follow to declare a major and declare a minor.

Yes. Please send change requests to arts-sci-variances@vanderbilt.edu and note the following guidelines:

  1. Each major must have 24 unique hours; each minor must have 15 unique hours.
  2. For a course to be unique to a major or minor, it must fulfill both of these conditions:
    • It must count toward a specific requirement in that major (e.g., Core, Concentration, or Electives in MHS); it cannot simply appear in the GPA.
    • It must not count toward a specific requirement in another major or minor.