"Subject 101" Was: Amusingly appropriate typo

[Carol]

Geoff wrote:
<snip>
> 
> On a different topic which arose from a previous post, I must ask a
 question as a possibly dense UK ex-teacher. I have often seen 
references to "Subject 101". What precisely is a subject with this  title?

Carol responds:

As Ali has noted, 101 denotes an introductory course. To provide a bit
more detail, many if not most four-year colleges and universities in
the U.S. assign course numbers according to the students' year of
study. Freshmen (first-year students) take courses with numbers in the
100s, sophomores take courses in the 200s, and so on. Of course, it
doesn't work out perfectly. You'll find sophomores in 100-level
courses and seniors in 300-level (junior or third-year) courses, and
so on. 

Sometimes, classes on similar subjects are assigned similar numbers,
so if English 101 is freshman composition, English 201 will be
sophomore composition (a class for students who feel that they need
additional writing practice or who are required by their departments
to take it because they did poorly in freshman comp). A 200-level
course may be a prerequisite for a 300-level course in the same
subject (or a 300 for a 400). The classification system is more
complex than I can explain here, but literature courses would be
assigned a different set of numbers from writing courses and
composition courses would also have a different set of numbers from
creative writing courses. Everything is (or was) nicely
compartmentalized. Or should that be "nice and compartmentalized"? ;-)

At the University of Arizona, where I taught freshman composition (and
a few other comp or lit courses) for sixteen of my eighteen years as a
university English teacher, English 101 was the standard
first-semester composition course (which taught essay writing and
research papers). Students whose writing skills were limited or
nonexistent took a remedial course (called English 100 at the
University of Arizona) students whose writing skills were
well-developed took an honors version of the course (English 103). The
second-semester  composition classes, English 102 (regular) and 104
(honors) focused on writing about literature (literary criticism),
including, again, a research paper. (I can't recall whether there was
a second-semester remedial English class. I think the 100 students
must have moved on to 101 and from there to 102.)

I hope that's not too much information, but I like to give examples
and other evidence to support my point--a practice I expected from my
composition students at any level--and, for that matter, from my lit
students in their essays as well.

BTW, Ali or someone who has recently taken university classes, does
the system still operate more or less as I've described it? I haven't
taught for ten years.

Carol, who forgot to mention that graduate courses for students
pursuing master's degrees or doctorates are numbered in the 500s and 600s