When Renee Kim ’28 tried to register for UNIV 1210: “Practical Experience in the Clinical Environment,” she was met with an already full class. Unable to register but still hoping to learn the content, she chose to audit the course.
The course, which is capped at 10 students, involves shadowing a doctor and helps develop common skills for pre-medical students, according to Kim.
“I just attend as if I was a normal registered student,” she said, noting that she has found that auditing “goes with the whole spirit of Brown.”
“You come because you genuinely want to learn something, not because you want a letter grade or an outcome out of it,” she added.
Kim is just one student who is auditing a course this semester, a policy that allows a student to sit in on a course without receiving course credit or a grade. Similar to the Satisfactory/No Credit course option, auditing provides a space for students to learn more about topics they are genuinely curious about, multiple students told The Herald.
Students usually choose to audit a course as their fifth class, according to Senior Associate Dean of Advising Timothy Shiner.
While students who are auditing courses are presented with the opportunity to explore topics they are interested in in a stakes-free environment, Shiner noted that “the student is likely to get out of it what they put in.”
Vivek Joseph GS, a third-year Ph.D. student in religious studies who is auditing RELS 2110E: “Just Home: Place, Belonging and Justice,” is using the opportunity to dive deeper into his academic interests and work with a new professor. Three years into his degree, Joseph is not required to complete coursework, but he chose to audit the course anyway.
“Participating in the class gives me a chance to hear what other people are thinking about possible new ways of going about the material,” he said.
“I do the readings, I come to classes, I engage, but I don’t really do the assignments,” Joseph added, “because, anyway, I’m not really being graded.”
Audited courses still appear on students’ transcripts, and the course requirements for auditing students is “essentially completely up to the professor’s discretion,” said Ira Wilson, a professor of public health, professor of medicine and associate provost for academic space.
Wilson currently has two students auditing his course PHP 0310: “Health Care in the United States” and does not require them to complete the quizzes, exams, readings or even attend lectures. “If someone wants to learn something about health care, I’m happy to have them do it without putting on requirements,” he said.
Alex Aoki ’27 is taking an even less structured approach to learning: vagabonding, a term used when students attend a class without registering. Aoki wanted to continue practicing Japanese, but he was already enrolled in five courses. After speaking to the professor of JAPN 0300: “Intermediate Japanese,” Aoki decided to vagabond the course. Now, all he has to do is show up and engage with the material, but the course won’t appear on his transcript.
“Everything is up to me,” Aoki noted. “It’s nice as a breather.”
Aoki believed he would lose his Japanese language skills if he didn’t practice.
“My Japanese skills have definitely not deteriorated,” he said. “They’ve probably improved in comparison to the beginning of this semester, so at the very least I’m getting out of it what I wanted to get out of it.”
