A crosslisting has three parts:

  1. Home Course
  2. An Ident course or courses
  3. A “link” between the two indicating the courses are connected, called the “Crosslist.” This link is made via a WUCRSL linking process.

A crosslisting is a connection made between two or more courses, a home course and at least one ident. Crosslisting is a way of creating multiple course numbers for the SAME course (i.e. same instructor, same days & times, same group of students in the same classroom). Crosslisting has the potential to attract a broader group of students to a particular course because the same course can be advertised to students under different departments in Course Listings (e.g. home course Archaeology and ident course Anthropology).

When courses are created, they must be designated in one of two ways, as “home” courses or identical “ident” courses.

  • A Home course is a course that is created, maintained and “owned” by one academic department (aka the “home” department). The home department is primarily responsible for the decision making and logistical support for the course and instructor.
  • An Ident is the exact same course as the Home (i.e. same instructor, same topic, same class time, etc.), but is simply being offered to students through another department for purposes of registering under a different department and course number. This can be helpful to students who might want their transcripts to reflect course numbers that are more relevant to their area(s) of study.
  • A Home courses may have multiple Idents, but an Ident can only be associated with one Home course.
  • A Home course can have one or more sections. An Ident course does not have its own section(s), but rather shares the section(s) of the Home course.
  • Using crosslisted courses is a way of creating multiple course numbers for the SAME course (i.e. same instructor, same days & times, same group of students in the same classroom).
  • As of 8/27/15, newly created ident courses that have never been linked to a home course get created with the same grade options as the home course. For example, if a home course has a grade option of credit only, the new ident Semester record will also get created with the credit only grade option. (This happens after the ident is linked to the home using the Crosslist window). In the past, when a new ident was linked to a home course, the ident would get created with the default grade options of credit, pass/fail and audit, regardless of how the home course grade options were set-up. This often caused the grade options between homes and idents to be different, causing problems for students and instructors.
  • In the majority of cases, it is desirable (and necessary) to have the grade options between homes and idents match. However, if necessary, WUCRSL will continue to allow you to choose different grade options for homes and idents.
  • To compare the grade options for homes and idents in your area, run one or both of the Semester reports called “Home Courses and Related Idents” or “Ident Courses and Related Courses.”

Advantages to Crosslisting:

  • Crosslisting has the potential to attract a broader group of students to a particular course. For example, let’s say there is a course called “Campaign Finance Reform” that is home based on Economics and crosslisted with an ident in Political Science. A student, who is interested in Political Science, sees the course in the Political Science course listings as L32 3019 and decides to enroll in it because it sounds interesting. If this same course were only offered under the Economics home department course number as L11 3019 and not crosslisted, the student may never have seen it, because she may never have thought to browse Economics courses.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SETTING-UP A CROSSLISTING

Instructions on creating a crosslising (PDF)