The Core Curriculum
What is the Core Curriculum?
The Core Curriculum is the foundation of every AUC student’s education — the heart of the liberal arts experience. It includes courses in writing, language and information literacy; philosophic and scientific thinking; Arab history, literature and society; and foundational classes in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.
The Core Curriculum prepares you to be a well-rounded individual, excelling not just in your chosen field of study but ensuring that you can think for yourself, solve problems outside your field and quickly pick up new skills in today's ever-changing world.
Whatever your major, you need to explore and understand science, social science and the humanities to be a thoughtful human being and citizen. The Core Curriculum is a body of courses designed to provide a broad liberal arts base to your education at AUC. It aims to develop your basic academic and intellectual traits, familiarize you with certain bodies of knowledge and intellectual traditions, and show you how this diversity can be integrated. It covers a wide range of human experience and knowledge, with a specific emphasis on the Arab world. It assists you in understanding your place in the world — socially, culturally, intellectually and historically.
The Core Curriculum also aims to enhance your writing skills — and thereby your ability to reason and construct an argument — in both English and Arabic. Instruction ranges from small seminars and regular classes to large lectures. All courses, except the Information Literacy Clinic, give letter grades and academic credit.
AUC’s Core Curriculum is designed to ensure that you:
- Acquire basic language and literacy skills, such as reading, writing and speaking English fluently; possess basic competence in Arabic; and are familiar with basic library and information technology skills
- Encounter patterns of rational thought and argumentation that underpin the world’s great intellectual traditions, as well as ways in which science addresses and seeks to comprehend the natural world
- Acquire familiarity with the modern Arab world and its historical and literary heritage
- Experience ways in which the liberal arts enrich your ability to understand and appreciate the world
The Core Curriculum Learning Outcomes
AUC’s three-tiered core curriculum has common learning outcomes that increase in depth, scope and complexity as students progress from the freshman to the capstone level. All core courses include some or all of the following outcomes.
Check out Learning Outcomes Here.
The Core Curriculum Requirements and Levels
The Core Curriculum sets out a series of requirements that are a vital part of an AUC education, and that all students must meet to graduate with an undergraduate degree from this University.
The Core Curriculum consists of three parts: the Freshman Level, the Secondary Level and the Capstone Level.