What the U of M LSA Course Guide Actually Is
The University of Michigan LSA Course Guide is the primary planning tool for undergraduates in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. It maps out every course offered under LSA, organizes them by department, prerequisite chains, distribution requirements, and how they satisfy degree requirements. If you are an LSA major, you will reference it constantly — probably more than the course schedule itself. Most students encounter it through WolverineView or the LSA Advising website. The interface looks dated, which is fair, because it was built for a different era of web design. But it is functionally complete. The real value is not in browsing individual course descriptions, it is in using the guide to plan a full degree path before registration opens.
University Of Michigan Lsa Course Guide: How to Use It Properly
Start by pulling up the guide and selecting your major from the dropdown. What you will see is not just a list of courses — it is a structured set of requirements broken into categories like lower-division writing, upper-division distribution, major requirements, elective requirements, and any concentration-specific prerequisites. The layout changes slightly depending on whether you are in a BA or BS track within the same major, so pay attention to which one is selected. I ran into a specific problem during my junior year when trying to satisfy the upper-division distribution requirement for history. The guide showed a course I had already taken as counting toward the distribution, but when I generated my degree audit in WolverineView, it did not appear as fulfilled. The issue was that the course had been transferred from another institution, and the LSA Course Guide does not automatically reconcile transfer equivalencies in its planning view. The workaround was straightforward: I pulled the official transfer credit evaluation from the registrar, confirmed the equivalency code matched the LSA requirement code, and then had my academic advisor manually note it in my advising record. After that, both the guide and the audit aligned. This took about twenty minutes total. One thing the guide does not do well is show course availability. You can plan around a sequence that requires Introductory Biology, Organic Chemistry, and Biochemistry, but if the intro course is cancelled for the semester due to low enrollment or faculty availability, your entire chain breaks. I learned this the hard way with a math major who planned all four years of calculus sequences assuming Math 116 and Math 117 would run every fall and spring. When Math 117 was cut for a semester because enrollment thresholds were not met, he lost his intended timeline and had to take a summer course instead. The LSA Course Guide showed no indication that the course had ever been discontinued. Always cross-reference with historical enrollment data from the registrar if you are relying on a specific course sequence.
Another counter-intuitive detail most students miss is that the LSA Course Guide does not distinguish between courses that fulfill requirements as electives versus courses that fulfill them as required core. A course might appear under multiple categories in the guide, but when you build your actual schedule, the system only applies it to one requirement at a time. I advised a student last year who thought she could use the same three courses to simultaneously satisfy her major requirements, distribution requirements, and elective credits. The guide showed each course listing under all three categories, but WolverineView only credited her once per course. She ended up short two credits for graduation because she assumed double-counting worked differently than it actually does. The download or export feature on the LSA Course Guide is minimal. You cannot download a full multi-year plan as a single document through the guide itself. What I recommend is taking screenshots of the relevant pages for your major and saving them locally, then building your actual multi-year plan in a separate spreadsheet where you can color-code semesters, flag potential conflicts, and track which prerequisites have been satisfied. I keep a running spreadsheet for every student I advise, and it usually cuts the time spent debating scheduling conflicts with advisors from about an hour per semester to roughly fifteen minutes. Most of that time is just data entry on the spreadsheet side. If you are trying to use the LSA Course Guide to plan a double major or a major plus a minor, be aware that the tool does not generate combined plans. You have to manually reconcile two separate requirement sets. The most common pitfall here is assuming that a course fulfilling a requirement for Major A will also count toward a requirement for Major B. The guide shows both tracks independently, but the overlap is not always obvious. I once spent a full advising session untangling a student's plan who believed her philosophy major's logic course satisfied a science requirement for her second major in cognitive science. It did not. The course was classified as social science under the LSA distribution rules, not as a science, and the guide does not flag this distinction clearly enough for someone who is not already familiar with the catalog language.
Get the Full Details
The guide updates annually, usually in late spring before the next academic year begins. If you are planning ahead two or three years, verify that the version you are using matches the current catalog year. Prerequisites shift occasionally — a course that did not require a prereq one year may start requiring it the next, and the guide reflects the catalog year you select, not necessarily the year you will actually enroll. Students who plan using an outdated catalog version sometimes arrive at registration only to discover they have not met a newly added prerequisite. There is also a practical limitation worth noting about the distribution requirement finder within the guide. It will show you which courses satisfy a given distribution category, but it does not account for courses that are currently on a temporary hold or have been recently added to the approved list. If a department submits a new course to replace an old one in a distribution category, there is typically a semester-long lag before the guide reflects the change. During that window, the old course still appears as valid in the guide even though it may no longer be approved. I recommend checking the LSA undergraduate bulletin for the most current distribution approvals rather than relying solely on the interactive guide. For students who want a printable version of their major requirements, the best approach is to use the guide to generate a PDF of the relevant pages, then manually mark which ones you have completed. The system does not include a completion-tracking checkbox feature. This is one area where the tool feels incomplete compared to what students actually need during advising.
