In UniMAP, there are essentially 2 categories of courses – core courses and university-required courses.

Core courses A core course is a pure engineering course, or one that is directly related to engineering, that students take according to their chosen discipline. For degree programmes, there are typically a total of 32 courses to be taken in this category, each course carrying 3-4 units, and the total number of units being 120 (of which 9-16 units are made up of elective courses –- see below for explanation of elective courses). This makes up about 89% of the curriculum. Students need to pass these courses before they can graduate. Hence, if they fail core courses, they have to repeat them in the following semesters.

Elective courses Elective courses are essentially core courses that are offered to enrich the student’s learning experience in the University. They provide students the opportunity to choose courses based on their interest, or courses that are seen to be increasing in importance. The student can deepen or broaden his/her understanding of particular subject areas by selecting the appropriate elective courses, which are outside but related to his/her chosen focus of study. The idea is to provide some degree of flexibility for students to choose courses from. The flexibility, however, is limited within the confines of Engineering.

As with the regular core course, each elective course carries 3 or 4 units. Degree programme students undertake elective on their third and/or fourth year of study.
University-required courses In contrast, university-required courses are those which are outside of the engineering domain. This category of courses, although not directly related to engineering per se, play an immensely important role in building up the character of the student. University-required courses for degree programmes make up approximately 11% of the curriculum, or 15 units out of the 135 units that students need to accumulate in order to be considered for graduation. Out of this 15, 2 units should be from an ‘option’ course (below).

Option courses Option courses are courses offered by the Centre for Communication Skills and Entreprenuership (PKKK), apart from the 13 university-required courses stated above. Degree programme students must collect 2 units of Option before graduation. If a student collects more than 2 units, the additional units are not counted towards graduation. However, the grade acquired by the student is used in the CGPA calculations, and the total number of credits collected by the student will be stated in the student’s transcript.