How Elective and Surplus Credits Count Toward Graduation

Elective and surplus credits

For the 2025 Faculty of Science and Technology at the Saitama Hatoyama Campus, taking an elective course is optional, but credits earned in the course count toward the credits required for graduation.

The category described as courses freely selected and earned generally includes credits earned beyond the required graduation totals for common education and specialized education. For the 2026 Second Division Faculty of Engineering, this also includes credits exceeding the required totals for practical knowledge-focused courses. For the 2025 Faculty of Future Science, credits exceeding the required total in each common-education or specialized-education category are included.

For the 2026 Science and Technology Faculty curriculum tracks, credits included in the elective category can include credits exceeding the required totals for general or specialized education, as well as credits from other faculties or partner universities. In the Science curriculum track, specialized-education credits earned beyond 80 credits, including self-selected courses, count toward the graduation requirement for the elective category. The same rule about specialized-education credits exceeding 80 credits applies to the Mechanical Engineering curriculum track.

For the listed 2025 and 2026 curricula, credits earned beyond the required number of courses or credits in the relevant education categories may therefore be counted as freely selected or elective credits, subject to the category rules for that curriculum.

Credits from other faculties, departments, or universities

For the 2025 Faculty of Future Science and the 2026 Second Division Faculty of Engineering, credits earned by taking courses offered by another faculty or department are treated as elective credits within the category of courses freely selected and earned. For the Second Division Faculty of Engineering, Human Science courses and free-choice courses are excluded from this treatment.

For the 2025 Faculty of Future Science and the 2026 Mechanical Engineering curriculum track in the Faculty of Science and Technology, credits earned through courses from another faculty or department, and credits earned through courses at a partner university, are included among the credits that may be counted in the elective category. For the Faculty of Future Science, credits from other faculties or departments are included except for free-choice courses.

Teacher-training courses that may count

For the 2025 Faculty of System Design and Technology, some teacher-training courses can be added to the credits required for graduation as elective courses. The treatment of each course is indicated in the required, elective, or self-selected classification column of the course allocation table for the student's faculty and department.

For the 2025 Second Division Faculty of Engineering, some teacher-training courses can also be added to the graduation requirement as elective-course credits.