Transfer Credit and the Writing Requirement

The Program in Writing and Rhetoric works closely with the Registrar’s Office to determine whether college writing and speaking courses taken outside of Stanford can fulfill the WR 1 or WR 2 requirements.  If you want to pursue this sort of request, the course in question must be from an accredited university and be already accepted by the Stanford Registrar for transfer credit.

To start the process for inquiring whether you can satisfy the writing requirement(s) through transfer credit, review the procedure on the here (paying particular attention to instructions regarding transfer credit for a General Education requirement. Once you have read through instructions for requesting credit, you can fill out this form. (Please don't complete the form if it is clear the college course you took {high school courses--included AP--cannot be used for equivalency} does not meet the metric for equivalency provided in the links below.) If you have additional questions about the writing requirement that might arise during this process, you can contact PWR at pwrcourses@stanford.edu.

In order to grant students equivalence for PWR 1 or PWR 2 based on prior coursework elsewhere, we need to establish that the course had a pedagogical approach and assignment requirements equivalent to the PWR course in question.

The form will ask you to provide:

• The name of the class, professor, institution, the year that you took the course, and the number of weeks and hours per week that the class met
• The course syllabus, including class schedule
• Any additional assignment sheets that the instructor may have given you for major writing (and for PWR 2 equivalence, speaking) assignments

Note: AP English courses cannot satisfy the WR 1 or WR 2 requirement.  In addition, you can't count the same course toward both PWR 1 and PWR 2 equivalence.

Follow the links below to review the specific criteria that we use to evaluate courses for PWR 1 or PWR 2 equivalence.