Providing syllabi far in advance A student from another university is planning on taking a class I'll be teaching this fall and will be doing it as a transient student. Apparently, in order to have their transient status approved, they need a copy of the course syllabus, and so requested it from me by email.

I don't normally finalize my syllabi until a few days before classes start — certainly not five months in advance —, and the course itself is not one that is identical each semester so I don't feel comfortable just sending an old syllabus. (And even that wouldn't exist if it were a new class or a special topics class)

It seems odd to need the syllabi so early — AFAIK the normal process is for his home institution to review the syllabi after taking the classes to determine credit given.

So two parter:


Is this a normal request that somehow has just never come by me before?
If it is, how do you handle for courses that don't have syllabus ready to go?
It's not so unusual in the U.S., for example when the student is coming from abroad, with their own funding, for one semester or so. I've had to do this a handful of times in 30+ years.
I approximate a syllabus, and in a cover-note say that it is approximate. There's no real loss in doing some part of that work months in advance, hopefully.