Course Credit Petition & Conflict Form

Petitioning VDS Course Credits 

- What can we successfully petition for

- What can we claim credit for (w/o petition)

- VDSers can petition the fall BIO377 or BIO206L/BIO177 for 'upper division' bio lab credit (even though BIO377 isn't specifically on the degree plan).  And perhaps the CH369k for upper division chem lab credit. 

- for Molecular Biology Lab  

- maybe for Genetics lab?

Biology majors - this works. 

Microbio and Neurogolgy Majors - won't work well

NOTE:  6/20/25

Texas Medical schools know that for UT - you can petition pretty much any 2 or 3 hour lab to replace 206L in the requirements.  Nothing besides BIO 206L counts automatically for TMDSAS or AMCAS.  In AMCAS, if a med school has shifted to looking for proficiencies, again almost any course can count.  If they are looking for 8 hours of intro bio, they need to formally petition.  As a general rule, doing research that they can talk about is better for admissions than taking any mentor course. 

Outline for course petition process

1)      Student tells advisor that they want to petition for upper division course credit using their fall FRI lab.(let Dr. B know if the advisor dissuades you from this - some aren't advocated for it but still may be worth doing)

2)      Advisor will ask student for:

a.       A brief (I think one page) write-up of their lab work (can often use your fall final report)

b.       A corroborating statement from the RE about student’s work in the lab. This can be literally one sentence via email to the advisor, that is all they require (for example, “Yes, this is my student, they were in my lab course, I approve this petition”) - but Dr. B can also elaborate more on your role and why your work should be petition-worthy. 

3)      Once the student write-up of lab work and the corroborating statement are submitted, the advisor will submit these on up the chain of command and the petition is usually approved shortly thereafter.

Course Conflict Override Forms

Here is the Course Conflict Override Form Download Here is the Course Conflict Override Form

• New (as of 5/19/22) - Course Conflict Override form as DocuSign (PowerForm)

  • this gets electronically sent to the FRI scheduling person. Then sends it gets sent to Dr.B to sign. 

• The form has two purposes, please ignore the middle section and fill in the top and bottom.  

• The student should register for the other class now, add the unique for this class (no signature required), and put in the unique for VDS class.

• NOTE:   for VDS - usually only 1 of the two credits has a scheduled lab time (i.e the Conference Course or the Lab Course) - so, you only need to do the course conflict override form for the class that conflicts with the scheduled time of you non-VDS class. 

• The completed, signed form can be physically taken to the Registrar, or an emailed copy can be send to the FRI scheduling office (FRI@utexas.edu) who will have the Registrar force the override.