Choosing courses to protect your average.

Do not pair two unpredictable courses

There is a distinction worth making between a hard course and an unpredictable one. A hard course is demanding in a way you can plan for: heavy reading, difficult problem sets, a known workload. An unpredictable course has a group project, a placement, a research component or a marker whose expectations only become clear at the first return.

Hard courses pair fine with anything. Two unpredictable courses in one term is the combination that produces disasters, because when one goes wrong it consumes the time the other needed and there is no slack anywhere. Pair unpredictable with predictable, every time.

Sequence prerequisites so the hard one has room

Where a sequence exists, the term in which you take the difficult entry course determines a lot. Taken alongside a light load it is manageable; taken alongside three other demanding courses it becomes the thing everything else is sacrificed for.

It is also worth taking a foundational course before the term where you most need to perform, rather than during it. Statistics taken in a quiet term makes the research methods course a year later dramatically easier, and taking them adjacent under pressure produces the opposite.

• Never pair two courses whose workload you cannot predict
• Put the demanding foundational course in the lightest term available
• Check when each course's heaviest deliverables fall, not just when it runs
• Note any course with a pass requirement — it outranks scheduling
• Where start dates are flexible, space heavy weeks deliberately apart

Look at when the weight lands, not when the course runs

Two courses running the same term can be entirely comfortable or entirely unmanageable depending on whether their major deliverables coincide. Most syllabi are available before enrolment, or shortly afterwards, and ten minutes comparing their assessment dates will tell you.

Where you have any control over start dates — rolling enrolment, sub-terms, self-paced formats — this is the highest-value use of that control. Two courses whose final projects fall a month apart are a completely different term from two whose finals fall in the same fortnight.

Protecting an average is a multi-term game

A cumulative figure responds to consistency far more than to peaks, which means the enrolment decision that matters is the one that prevents a bad term rather than the one that enables a brilliant one.

That is an unglamorous way to plan and it is what actually moves the number over a degree. If distinction is the goal, the terms you did not damage matter more than the terms you excelled in — which is worth knowing while there are still enough credits left for the arithmetic to be in your favour.