Any student who is deviating from courses that are listed in the degree planner will need to petition for a course substitution request. This course substitution request will allow you to ask your Curriculum Advisor for permission to deviate from the degree planner. Your primary M.S. advisor will contact you with the outcome of your request(s) and let you know when the degree audit has been updated, if applicable.

For all Fall 2022 admitted students and onward, you can only submit a maximum of three (3) requests during your entire program, and only two (2) of the approved courses can be counted towards your degree. Any additional requests will not be reviewed so please submit your requests after careful consideration. Computer Engineering (EC79) students are exempt from this policy due to the nature of their course setup. Please refer to the third tab on this page for details. 

Effective Spring 2023, students will not be able to have course substitution requests processed during their graduating quarter. Please be sure to plan accordingly and submit your requests beforehand so that they can be reviewed and processed before your graduating quarter. If a student submits a request and it is their graduating quarter, the request will not be processed.

You should submit a course substitution request when:

• You took a core course (i.e. ECE 143) in your B.S. program at UCSD and it was counted towards your UG degree. You need another course for your core course section. 
• A core course is not offered the entire time during your program. 
• You would like to take a course outside of JSOE to count towards your Technical Elective section. 

You should NOT submit a course substitution request when:

• You would like to take a different course to count towards your Additional Core section when there are other courses on the Additional Core section being offered. 
• You would like to take a course out of interest and this course can be counted towards the Technical Elective section.
• You would like to substitute a core course when it is being offered during the academic year.

We encourage students to plan out their courses at the beginning of their program carefully by using your degree planner. When in doubt, please contact your M.S Advisor

Please fill out the ECE Course Substitution Request Form if you would like to make a request. Please do not contact your Curriculum Advisor about the requests, your M.S. Advisor will contact them on your behalf.

• If you would like to request multiple course substitutions, please submit one request for each course substitution.
• You will be asked if it is a Course Substitution or a Course Addition request:
  • Course Substitution: If you'd like to substitute one course for another course.
  • Course Addition: if you’d like to add a course that is not listed on the degree planner.
• You will be required to provide a detailed justification (1-2 sentences, in your own words) and a course description. Otherwise, your request will not be reviewed.
• You will be required to upload the new course's syllabus.
• You will receive an email from your M.S. Advisor with the outcome of the request within four weeks.

• Please follow the steps above regarding filing the ECE Course Substitution Request Form.
• List of pre-approved course substitutions (2 classes total allowed from this list):
  • Additional Units Section:
    • CSE 210, CSE 222A, CSE 223B, CSE 240B/C/D, CSE 244A, CSE 250A/B, CSE 258/258R, CSE 291 (Healthcare Robotics); ECE 208, ECE 226, ECE 227, ECE 228, ECE 285 (Deladalle MLIP version); replace ECE 267 with ECE 268. 
  • Technical Electives Section:
    • COGS 220
• For the 2022-2023 academic year only, the following courses are also pre-approved for the additional core section (1 additional class allowed from this list):
  • ECE 226 Optimization and Acceleration of Deep Learning on Various Hardware Platforms
  • ECE 268 Security of Hardware Embedded Systems
  • ECE 284 Special Topic in CE: Low-power VLSI Implementation for Machine Learning
  • ECE 284 Special Topic in CE: Mobile Health Design
  • ECE 284 Special Topic in CE: Parallel Computing in Bioinformatics

The ECE Department is allowing all MLDS students to use the classes listed in the Applications and Analytics sections, toward the Computation section. If you would like to use classes from the Applications and Analytics sections in the Computation section, please submit a course substitution request. The classes are as follows:

• ECE 225B Universal Probability and Its Application in Data Science 
• ECE 250 Random Processes 
• ECE 271B Statistical Learning II 
• ECE 273 Convex Optimization and Applications 
• ECE 275A-B Parameter Estimation I, Parameter Estimation II 
• ECE 285 Stochastic Approximation: Theory and Applications 
• ECE 285 Semidefinite and Sum-of-Squared Optimization
• ECE 208 Computational Evolutionary Biology 
• ECE 228 Machine Learning for Physical Applications 
• ECE 284 Digital Health Systems 
• ECE 285 Intro to Mathematical Finance 
• ECE 285 Intro to Visual Learning 
• ECE 285 Deep Generative Models 
• ECE 271C Deep Learning & Applications 
• ECE 276 A-B-C Sensing and Estimation in Rob

We sincerely apologize for the lack of Computation classes being offered and hope that this flexibility will help you meet your degree requirements in time. 

Additionally, a revision was made for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 degree planners which allows DSC 200+ coursework to be used in the technical electives section of the degree planner. We have asked the Registrar's Office to make this edit onto the DARs uAchieve so that it could automatically populate after enrolling in DSC 200+ courses but it will take some time for it to be reflected. In the meantime, if you would like your planner edited to reflect DSC 200+ course(s) in the technical electives section, please submit a course substitution request. This will not count as one of the 3 allowed submissions that we enforce.