DNP Prerequisite Courses
Prerequisite courses must be completed at an accredited college or university:
- A letter grade of a B- or better is required for all prerequisite courses. Note: Grades below B- are not sufficient for prerequisites. Applicants must plan their courses accordingly where if they need to retake the course, they have enough time to do so during the application process. This will guarantee completion prior to enrollment in the program.
- Labs are not required for science courses. However, please check with your home state as labs may be required for your home state licensure.
- Prerequisites do not have to be completed by the application deadline. They must be completed by the start of the program. However, it is strongly recommended that at least one science prerequisite is completed by the application deadline.
- While there is no expiration for previous prerequisite courses, for any science or statistics course taken over 5 years ago (with a B- grade or better), we recommend applicants take a refresher course to ensure a strong foundation in these subjects. While the Office of Admissions cannot provide recommendations, these refresher courses can be found for free online.
- Online and community colleges are acceptable for prerequisite courses.
Statistics
The following types of courses may satisfy the requirement: Introduction to Statistics, Basic Statistics, Biostatistics, Applied Statistics, Descriptive Statistics, Business Statistics, Probability Theory, Statistical Design, and Experiment Analysis. A statistics course should include mastery of the following concepts:
- Measures of central tendency, dispersion, graphs, the chi-square distribution, the normal distribution, sampling distributions, t-tests, and correlation.
- Principles of measurement, data summarization, univariate, and bivariate statistics.
Health/Physical Assessment
A course in this area should include the following concepts:
- Integration of concepts and theories of biological, psychological, and sociocultural knowledge to impact health promotion, health maintenance, and illness care.
- Concepts of prevention, anticipatory guidance, and early detection of risk factors incorporated into holistic care.
Contact
Questions about prerequisite courses should be emailed to the Office of Admissions at nursingadmissions@cumc.columbia.edu. To verify whether a course satisfies our requirements, please include a copy of the course description and/or syllabus.