Courses: Curriculum Codes

The information below applies to students entering prior to Fall 2025. If you are an undergraduate student entering in Fall 2025 or later, you can find more information about your curriculum here.

The Trinity undergraduate curriculum categorizes courses to signal how they fulfill general education requirements. Courses may have one or more of the following codes associated with them. 

CodeDescriptionType of Requirement
ALPArts, Literatures, and PerformanceAreas of Knowledge
CZCivilizationsAreas of Knowledge
NSNatural SciencesAreas of Knowledge
QSQuantitative StudiesAreas of Knowledge
SSSocial SciencesAreas of Knowledge
CCICross-Cultural InquiryModes of Inquiry
EIEthical InquiryModes of Inquiry
FLForeign LanguagesModes of Inquiry
RResearchModes of Inquiry
STSScience, Technology, and SocietyModes of Inquiry
WWritingModes of Inquiry
Course code requests by departments must be made before the beginning of the semester in which the course is offered.
Code changes cannot be made on an ad hoc basis while a course is in progress.
Changes, once approved, may not be applied retroactively to a course. 

 

 

 

 

IMPORTANT: The curricular codes that appear on DukeHub for a course on the first day of class in any given semester are final.

Those and only those codes will apply towards a student’s general education requirements. No additional codes will be awarded concurrently or retroactively to that particular offering of the course.

 

 

 

Process to assign curriculum codes to a course:

 

  1. The process begins department or program level with a proposal that a course bear certain codes. 
  2. The proposal, depending upon the department or program, may originate with the individual instructor, with the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS), or through collaboration by both.
  3. The department then submits the proposed codes for consideration by the Arts and Sciences Committee on Courses, which must approve codes.
Courses in Trinity College may have at most two Areas of Knowledge and no more than three Modes of Inquiry codes.
  • Because of these limits, coding involves decisions as to which of the various codes best reflect the course content at the time the set of codes is approved.
  • If the content (or the instructor) of a course later changes, such that the set of codes that the course bears no longer accurately reflects the course content, the codes may be changed.
  • This can happen, however, only following reconsideration by the Courses Committee.
There are several ways to find curriculum codes:
  1. Log in to DukeHub, click on the "Class Information" tab, then click on "Course Catalog" to see the courses offered in each department or program. When you click to open a class (view sections), you will find the codes under "Class Attributes".
  2. Search for a course by clicking on the "Enrollment" tab and then use "Schedule Builder to import courses. Curriculum codes will be listed under "Class Attributes" when you open a class. 
  3. You can also look for classes that carry specific course codes (e.g. ALP or R, etc.) through the "Advanced Class Search" tab. You can click on Course Attribute and Course Attribute Value to see classes that are coded for a class attribute that you are looking for. 
  4. Go to registrar.duke.edu, click on the "Registration" tab in the menu and then click on "Course Catalog & Schedule of Classes"