Summary
This article will help you understand the requirements that go into degrees and how your previous credits and planned courses are applied to those requirements in Degree Planner.
Before you begin reading
This article assumes you have already successfully logged into Starfish and have found and opened the Degree Planner link from the hamburger menu in the My Success Network page in Starfish. If you have yet to find Degree Planner, use the link below for the steps to do so:
Where to find Degree Planner?
This article also assumes you have successfully found and built a degree plan in Degree Planner. If you have yet to build a plan, use the link below to do so:
Exploring & Building plans in Degree Planner
This article further assumes you have experienced finding and placing courses to take inside your plan in the Courses tab of Degree Planner. If you have yet to explore your plan timeline in the Courses tab, use the link below to do so:
Inside Your Degree Planner Plan: Courses
IMPORTANT: Degree plans are intended to guide you in the selection of courses, but given the complexity of this process, the college does not guarantee plans will always be 100% accurate. If you have completed AP, IB, CLEP, DANTE, DLPT exams and/or college coursework from another institution, you may have already met certain requirements and may not need to take additional courses. You must talk with an advisor to have your plan reviewed and approved.
Degree Requirements
If you have had an opportunity to explore degree details using the Browse feature when creating a new plan, the Requirements tab in your plan will look familiar. Simply clicking on the Requirements link in your plan will bring you to the tab.
Here you will find a breakdown of all the requirements that are needed for the degree aligned with what you have planned in your Course view timeline.
General Education Requirements
Let us further breakdown the General Education requirements for this American Ethnic Studies Pre-Major AA-DTA degree with what specifically Degree Planner is telling you about your plan:
- Some general information about this section: that general education requires at least 20 credits and that none of the credits used to satisfy these requirements can be used to satisfy other requirements in this degree.
- 10 of those 20 credits should be used for Communication courses, specifically English Composition I and II (these are required courses that automatically built into your plan) and it shows when in your plan they are planned to be taken.
- There is a multicultural understanding elective for 5 credits. You can identify it as an elective because it has a title with a credit value. In this instance, a course has been selected: AES101, and it shows when that course is planned.
- There is a Quantitative/Symbolic Reasoning (QSR) elective for 5 credits. Again, you can identify it as an elective because it has a title with a credit value. In this instance nothing has been chosen for this in your plan, so it has a placeholder planned for Winter 2027.
- You can add a course directly on this tab by clicking the + Add Course link.
- This works just like the Courses tab and will provide you with a list of courses that can satisfy the QSR elective for Winter quarter of 2027, since that is where the placeholder is located.
- Selecting a course will then populate that course in your plan and update the Requirements tab.
- You also change the quarter you would like to plan this course using the Term dropdown menu.
Scrolling further down on the Requirements tab you will find additional requirements for this degree.
Distribution Requirements
Since this specific degree is an AA-DTA, or transfer degree, it will include Distribution requirements.
Distribution requirements usually have you take a set number of credits in three major categories:
- Humanities
- Social Sciences
- Natural Sciences
For the AA-DTA degree, that number is 15 credits, which usually 3 courses for each category. You can see this represented here in Degree Planner:
Again, you can add courses directly from this tab into your plan by clicking on the + Add Course link, and it will act exactly like clicking on a placeholder in the Course tab.
Things to pay attention to in this section are the rules associated with each distribution requirement:
Degree Guardrails
Degree Planner adheres to the rules listed by limiting the options available for planned courses.
For example, the Social Sciences requirement has a rule:
"Select from at least two different disciplines (e.g., Psychology and History) in Social Sciences."
Degree Planner will adhere to that rule by limiting applicable options for that requirement as you start to pick courses or as it applies previously completed courses.
Let's see this in action:
If you were to plan a PSYC course to count towards your Social Science requirement:
If you try to add an additional PSYC course using the + Add Course link, you will find that no PSYC courses will be listed:
This is Degree Planner adhering to the rule that courses from at least two departments must be taken to count towards the social science requirement. Once you select another course that is not PSYC:
Additional PSYC courses are now plannable from the + Add Course link:
For every section in requirements that has rules, Degree Planner will enforce them to ensure the plan will work to satisfy all necessary components to graduate with the degree.
General Elective Requirements
Towards the bottom of the requirements tab you will typically see a section about general electives, especially if the degree is an AA-DTA (transfer) degree.
Completed Requirements
This specific example highlights how Degree Planner recognizes and uses completed credits towards the degree requirements:
A green checkmark will be next to any course that has successfully satisfied a degree requirement:
Degree Planner will also identify if the course was taken at Shoreline or a different institution and transferred to Shoreline:
Taken at Shoreline: 
Transferred from a different source: 
Graduation Requirements
Among some of the last requirements listed will be graduation requirements. Unlike other requirements, these are used more generally to ensure a plan is meeting the appropriate credit targets needed to graduate.
There are typically 2 types of graduation requirements:
- Minimum Credit Requirement: Ensuring the degree has met the minimum number of credits needed to graduate, typically 90 credits, but varies among degree types.
- Residency Requirement: Ensuring that a minimum number of the total credits earned were earned at Shoreline and not transferred in, for the degree to be conferrable by Shoreline. Typically, 25 credits or 25% of credits needed for the degree.
Degree Planner lists all courses or placeholders used to satisfy the requirements. If a plan does not meet these requirements, an error will be created, and the plan will be determined as not complete.
Non-Applicable Credits
The last section of the requirements tab details any credits that Degree Planner could not use to satisfy other requirements:
In this specific example it shows there was a MATH&142 course that could not be used. But it also lists that the grade was 0.0 - providing a hint as to why it could not be used.
Any course from a student record that could not be used to meet a requirement will be found in this section and can include courses that were dropped, withdrawn, not passed or failed. It could also include courses that were successfully completed but did not meet any of the outstanding requirements in the degree plan.
View Options
At the top of the Requirements tab page, you will find options to sort and change the view of the page. It is automatically defaulted to Show All and By Grouping:
The Show All alternative is Show Unmet - which will filter out all requirements except those that have an error or are unmet. This can be useful when you encounter problems with degrees to quickly narrow down where the problem is in the plan.
The By Grouping alternative is By Priority - which will re-sort the degree requirements out of the categories used to define them and into the course order priority, namely the order by which Degree Planner attempts to place courses into plans. This can be useful when trying to see how plans are being built and why some courses are appearing in your plan before others.
