La Sapienza - Università di Roma

Students of the Master Programme in Computer Science are required to have a study plan (“percorso formativo”) in force in order to book and take exams.

What is a study plan?

A study plan completely defines the set of courses that a student plans to attend and to clear during their first and second year.

Without an approved study plan, students cannot book or take any exam.

Hence, students of the Master Programme in Computer Science are requested to submit for approval their own study plans at the beginning of their first year.

A study plan already in force can be revised by submitting for approval a new plan which includes all courses already cleared.

When a study plan can be submitted or revised?

Students can submit their study plans at most once per year, during the following time window: 

from December 1 to December 31 of each year.

Study plans still pending evaluation cannot be changed. For this reason, we warmly recommend students to pay great attention when submitting their study plans, and to do so only when they have clear ideas about which courses to attend (at very least in their next year).

How a study plan is submitted?

Study plans must be submitted using the online study plan submission system called “Percorsi Formativi” reachable from within Infostud. 

When and how is a study plan evaluated and approved?

The study plan submission system prevents the submission of most (but not all) study plans violating the rules.

Plans successfully submitted via the system are evaluated and approved either automatically (in real time) or manually by the study plan evaluation committee.

Automatically approved study plans

Study plans which satisfy all the rules, envision a proper balance of the number of exams to be cleared in the first and second year, and contain only courses offered within the Master Programme in Computer Science will be approved automatically by the system in real time. The system will immediately inform such students that their plan has been automatically approved.

Note, however, that although approved immediately, such study plans will come into force as explained below.

Study plans needing manual intervention of the evaluation committee

These are "custom plans" (percorsi individuali), plans envisioning a not even allocation of the courses between the two years, and those plans envisioning courses from other Sapienza programmes in section "Group D".

Study plans not approved automatically by the system need to be evaluated and (possibly) approved manually by the evaluation committee.

Evaluation of those plans will be done each year, immediately after the submission deadline expires and before the beginning of the exam session.

More in details, for those plans the committee needs to perform additional checks on the student curriculum to ensure their feasibility and to avoid abnormal situations. The most common issues experienced when evaluating such plans are as follows:

• A too high number of courses (more than 2/3) would have to be cleared in a single year
• Multiple courses on the same area are selected, which however have substantially overlapping programmes
• The plan includes courses from other Sapienza programmes (in section "Group D - Insegnamenti a scelta dello studente" of the form) which suffer from one or more of the following problems:
  • they are from a B.Sc. programme in computer science or computer engineering which are too similar to other courses in their plan, or to courses that the student already took during their B.Sc.; 
  • they cover an area very far from computer science, with poor motivation (but students should feel free to include advanced courses in other STEM disciplines);
  • although related to computer science, they are devoted to non-computer scientists, and are too basic for master students in computer science.

To avoid any risk of seeing their plan rejected after having invested time in attending lectures, we suggest students to follow our recommendations below.

When does an approved study plan come into force?

Study plans come into force from the academic year in which they have been submitted and will be in force until a new replacement study plan is submitted and approved. 

Please, note that although academic years start in September, their first exam session starts on January of following year. This means that any exam session held from September to December belongs to the previous academic year and can be used by students only to clear exams of courses that belong to their study plans already approved in the previous academic year.

What happens if a study plan is rejected?

In case a study plan is rejected, the student will be immediately contacted by a member of the evaluation committee in order to give recommendations, fix the problems, and find an agreement on a new study plan, which will be submitted by the committee and approved.

How do study plans affect the possibility to book or clear exams?

The Infostud system forbids students to book and clear an exam which is not included in their study plan currently in force. 

The consequence of the above rule is that students who have no study plan in force (because they never submitted one for approval) cannot book or take any exam.

How would I know that I'll succeed to include in my study plan the courses I attended during my first semester?

Students submitting their study plan for the first time (that is, first-year students) should know that they'll be able to include all courses of our master programme scheduled in the first semester of the first year. 
Thus, we recommend first-year students to relax, attend the lectures of the courses they are more interested in, and take their time to make their final selection at the end of the semester.

The only problem students might experience with including courses scheduled in the first semester of their first year is with courses chosen from other Sapienza programmes (and included in Group D of their plans). The suitability of such courses must be manually evaluated by the committee to avoid the issues listed above.
To avoid any risk, we thus recommend students to allocate these courses in the second semester of their first year or in their second year. By doing so, they will have their plan approved before attending lectures of (and investing time on) such courses.

We also recommend students, before submitting their first study plan, to take screenshots of the system pages listing all the available options (that is, of all the empty study plan templates available to them). Such options will remain stable for them throughout the years. In this way, they'll always have a full picture (with the exception of courses from other programmes) of how they could rearrange the courses they already cleared to enable changes to their plan (even by switching to a custom plan, if needed), should they change their mind in the future. Students should feel free to contact the committee for an informal opinion about their envisioned changes, by sending them filled-in drafts of one of such templates as a PDF file.

Are there exceptions to the above rules?

Yes, but only for students falling in at least one the following categories.

Exception 1. Students who, for whatever reason, have the right to enrol in the Master Programme after December 31, may ask assistance to the study plans evaluation committee in order to submit their first study plan by the following March 31. The committee will evaluate and approve such plans within 15 days. Such plans will come immediately into force.

Exception 2. Students who are going to spend time abroad according to the Erasmus programme may ask assistance to the study plans evaluation committee for immediate changes to their study plan, should they find serious administration problems at the hosting institution.

Exception 3. Students who cannot attend courses as envisioned in their study plans due to overlapping lectures or to unexpected changes to their timetable may ask assistance to the study plans evaluation committee for immediate changes aimed at resolving such conflicts.

Whom could additional questions be directed to?

The study plans evaluation committee can be contacted via email. The committee kindly invites students to avoid asking questions whose answer is already in the text above.

Received messages will be processed on a first-in first-out (FIFO) basis based on the name of the sender. The committee will do their best to answer within a week. 

The adopted FIFO policy means that any student can have at most one open email thread with the committee, and any new message received when a previous one from the same sender is still pending reply will be considered as a revision of the question, and make the sender lose their priority.