Searching for general education courses in Course Search & Enroll
When you browse courses in Course Search & Enroll, you will now see two different categories of general education requirements.
You will only need to follow one of the two sets of requirements. Which one you will follow depends on when you first enrolled as an undergraduate student (post-high school) at any institution – UW–Madison or elsewhere.
If you first enrolled as an undergraduate student at any college or university (post-high school) before Summer 2026:
You will follow your existing general education requirements.
How to find courses that meet general education requirements
In Course Search & Enroll, open the “Course Designation” drop-down menu. From there, you can filter by breadth (i.e. biological sciences, humanities, social sciences) and/or by category (i.e. Communication A, Quantitative Reasoning B).
If you select multiple course designations, Course Search & Enroll will return a list of courses that meet all of the options you chose. For example, if you select Humanities and Literature, your search results will show only courses that have both designations instead of courses that only have one designation. This is different from how Course Search & Enroll previously provided results; because of this change, your results when searching for courses may look different.
You can ignore the filters under the Core GenEd menu.
If you first enrolled or will first enroll as an undergraduate student at any college or university (post-high school) in Summer 2026 or later:
You will follow the Core GenEd requirements.
How to find courses that meet Core GenEd requirements
In Course Search & Enroll, open the “Core GenEd” drop-down menu. From there, you can filter by the Core GenEd categories (i.e. Civics & Perspectives, Math & Quantitative Reasoning, Humanities & Arts).
Courses can only have one Core GenEd category applied to them; if you search for multiple categories at the same time, you may not get any results.
General education requirements are one part of your overall degree requirements. You can use the “Course Designation” drop-down menu to refine your search to find courses that satisfy other degree requirements.
Other filters
The other filters available in Course Search & Enroll, including course levels, credits, honors designations, foreign language levels, and modes of instruction, did not change. You can use these filters regardless of which category of general education requirements you are following.
Enrollment help
Visit the Office of the Registrar’s KnowledgeBase (KB) for step-by-step instructions on using Course Search & Enroll.