An important part of the PhD education is the required coursework, or academic training. It equals six months of fulltime study (30 credits). The plan for academic training should be prepared after consultation with your supervisor.

A minimum of 20 ECTS credits have to be PhD courses listed in the PhD Study Handbook, or from equivalent programmes at other academic institutions in Norway or abroad.

Coursework

The following rules apply for all PhD programmes at the Faculty of Natural Sciences:

• The plan for academic training should consist of a minimum of 30 credits.
  • At least 20 credits are to be taken as established PhD level courses; see list of courses. (Click on Fetch more).
  • The remaining 10 credits can be filled with an Individual Study Syllabus or advanced master courses. The passing grade for PhD candidates taking master courses is A or B.
• The course MN8000 “Doing Science: Methods, Ethics & Dissemination” is mandatory for all PhD candidates admitted after 1 July 2015.
• All courses must be chosen within the disciplines of Natural Science or Technology.
• Courses that are awarded less than 3 credits will not be approved as part of the academic training.
• It is required that all courses end with a final examination of the candidate (mere participation will not be sufficient).
• Examination of PhD courses at the Faculty is assessed by a mark passed/not passed, where passed correspond to a score of 70 points on a scale from 0 to 100. Approved courses from other faculties will follow the grading scale at those faculties.

External Courses

Doctoral level courses from other universities can be approved if they meet the academic requirements of NTNU. A candidate who wants to undertake an external course must provide a complete course description in which the course's level (PhD or Master), number of credits and examination form is described. To be approved, courses must be awarded a minimum of 3 credits, and consist of an examination of the candidate in the end.

Individual Study Syllabus (course code DIXIL-10)

An Individual Study Syllabus should have a minimum of 3 credits, and should not overlap with existing courses. The syllabus must be on PhD level, and the topic should be from the Professor's field of expertise. The syllabus can be approved as part of the 10 credits that is not required to be on a PhD level.

Form for course description in the individual study syllabus (doc)

Obligatory courses

Please note that some PhD programmes have obligatory courses for all candidates.

Advanced courses

A small selection of "advanced courses" can differ in academic content from year to year. It can be used by guest lectures or others that for some reason can not offer a permanent course. To be approved, the realization of advanced courses should be followed by at least three candidates.

Changes in the academic training plan

Your plan for academic training is assessed and approved by the Faculty at the time of Admission. All changes to the plan should therefore be approved by the Faculty. Apply well ahead of the examination period.

• Form for application for changes in the academic training plan for PhD (doc)

PhD courses at Nordic Fice Tech

Nordic Five Tech (N5T) is an exclusive, strategic alliance of the five leading technical universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

A number of joint projects have been launched to support the vision of N5T as an extended campus. One of them is this joint PhD course database. The aim of this initiative is to increase mobility for our PhD students within the five universities and further strengthen the alliance by encouraging more research cooperation.

If you are a PhD student at one of the five N5T universities you do not have to pay for participating in courses registered in this database. Please note that the database also includes nontechnical PhD courses.