Skipping Complementary Electives with PICs
Do you have no interest for your complementary elective courses? Want to boost your Cumulative GPA? Would you rather focus your time and energy on more important classes?
Many people go through their entire undergrad without knowing what PICs are, and regret not knowing about them sooner.
tl;dr PICs allow you to declare any complementary elective into a pass/fail grading, and you can receive the credit without contributing to your GPA.
What are PICs?
Personal Interest Course (PIC) is an option to declare a course to be assessed as a Credit or No Credit (CR/NC) grading scale, also known as pass/fail. By making a course pass/fail, only a 50% minimum is required to complete the course and gain a credit.
PICs are meant for students to take courses outside of their program’s scope, without worrying about it affecting your Cumulative GPA. As a Software Engineering student, you have the option of declaring every one of your complementary elective courses as PIC.
How do I declare PICs?
- Log in to Mosaic.
- Open Student Center.
- Under Academics, click on Enroll.
- Click on Edit.
- Select the term you want to declare PICs for, and click Continue.
- In the dropdown, select the course you want to declare as PIC, and click Proceed
- Click Next until you reach the Class Preferences page.
- In the Grading dropdown, change it from Graded to Personal Interest Course.
- Confirm your changes, and that’s it!
FAQ
Can I declare any required course as PIC?
Unfortunately, PICs can only be applied towards complementary electives, and cannot be applied to required courses, nor technical electives.
Can I declare PICs at any time? Or am I too late?
You can only declare PICs before the sessional date for the “last day for enrolment and course changes (drop/add)”. You can find the exact date for each term on McMaster’s website.
Why are PICs useful?
Personally, I have found myself struggling to put 100% of my effort and focus in my SFWRENG courses. When complementary electives have tons of assessment deadlines like weekly quizzes, monthly essays, and written exams, they often get in the way of my other studying and extracurriculars.
PICs are useful for allowing anyone to achieve a 50% grade, and ignoring the course for the remaining of the term. To optimize this, I recommend calculating which assessments are the easiest to complete and achieve the 50% requirement. Once achieved, you can completely ignore submitting any additional assessments, and continue with your term stress-free.
Could I have declared my first year complementary electives as PIC?
PICs are only available to engineering students after Engineering Level I. So any complementary electives that were taken in first year must contribute to your Cumulative GPA, which is counted in your Level II stream selection.
Have any other questions?
A more in depth detailed description can be found here!