Students enroll in courses via TigerHub. Students meet with their advisers for guidance on the selection of courses, and then make an appointment with the director of graduate studies, who provides additional advice on course selection.

See the Graduate School’s policy on incompletes.

The department encourages students to complete all course requirements by the deadlines specified by the instructor for the submission of papers (whether dean's date or some other date). Students are discouraged from taking grades of incomplete, except for reasons of ill health or extraordinary personal circumstances.

Students are permitted to have only one incomplete in a departmental course on their record at any given time. The rules governing incompletes in departmental courses (i.e., courses taught within the Department of Art and Archaeology) are as follows:

• Incompletes are granted by the course instructor. However, a student who is taking an incomplete in a course must notify the DGS by the last day of classes.
• For a fall-term course, the extension may not go beyond the end of the second week of the spring semester. For a spring-term course, the extension may not go beyond September 1. The student's grade in the course will be based on the work submitted as of the extension. If the deadline arrives and a paper is still unfinished, it should be submitted in its unfinished state. If no paper is submitted by the deadline, the grade for the paper will be an F.
• Students from other departments enrolled in Department of Art and Archaeology courses cannot, of course, be held to our one-extension-per-semester policy. In any course taught by the department, however, they should have exactly the same right to an extension as the art and archaeology students in the course, no more and no less. It would be unfair to our own students to hold them to a two-week deadline if their work was going to be graded side-by-side with the work of students who had an extra month.

We recognize that courses offered by other departments and programs sometimes have built into them the expectation that students will continue to work on their research papers beyond the term in which the course is offered, and we do not wish to put our students at a disadvantage when they take those courses. We therefore place no restriction on incompletes in courses taken outside the Department of Art and Archaeology. However, a student who takes an incomplete in an outside course must so notify the DGS by the last day of classes, specifying exactly when the outstanding work will be submitted, and may not take an incomplete in any departmental course while carrying an incomplete outside the department.

All incomplete grades must be removed from a student's record before they take the general examination.

Note, finally, that instructors are under no obligation to give extensions. If, at the beginning of the course, the instructor states that it is their policy to give extensions only in case of illness, the two-week fall-term/four-week spring-term extension is not available to any (healthy) student, departmental or non-departmental. In other words, the purpose of the department's policy on incompletes is to set a limit on the extensions our faculty may grant; it does not oblige the faculty to grant extensions.

All students are required to precept at least once in order to acquire teaching experience. The application deadline is mid-May for the fall term, late October for the spring term. Students are encouraged to precept during their second or third year in the department. 

As stipulated by Graduate School policy, first-year students shall not precept.

Students who precept while in coursework are offered a one-time reduction in their course load. Preceptors must be present and available throughout the entire semester to assist with teaching and grading. Preceptors may not take the originals of student written work away from Princeton. At the beginning of each semester, the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning provides a required AI (assistants in instruction) orientation for students who have never precepted.

The process that leads to precepting assignments involves variables and unknowns (enrollment size), and three criteria that are potentially in conflict with one another: student interest, faculty interest, and funding issues. The most important point, however, is that the decision is made by the faculty course instructor.

Some courses, such as ART 100, always require preceptors. Even in this case, however, we do not know in advance how many preceptors will be needed. In the case of other courses (ART 209 would be an example) we know whether preceptors will be needed only after the undergraduates have preregistered.

Well in advance of preregistration, all enrolled graduate students are asked whether they are interested in precepting. At this time, they are given a list of courses to be offered in the next term that we know will need preceptors. When preregistration figures justify it, students are advised of any additional courses that may require preceptors.

It is important to understand that students must apply in advance to be considered as preceptors. When possible, the pool of preceptors for each course is determined by the students who indicate their interest on the application. When applying to precept, students must have their advisers send a supporting note.

The role of the department’s Graduate Office is limited to distributing applications to the graduate students and furnishing individual instructors with the information that appears on the application forms. If requested, the chair, department manager, or DGS may offer advice to a faculty member regarding precept assignments, but they do not make the decisions that assign students to precepts in specific courses; those decisions are made by the instructor responsible for the course.

Faculty make informed decisions based on an awareness of all students interested in precepting for a given course. If some of the students who have expressed an interest are in Dissertation Completion Enrollment status (DCE) (see Dissertation Completion Enrollment Status (DCE)), the faculty will know this, just as they will know if a student has a grade of incomplete on her or his record.

The criteria that the faculty may take into account include the following:

• Considerations of quality (who will make the best preceptor[s], based on field, course work, experience, etc.)
• Considerations of equity (for example, if two students have applied for one position, if one has already had an opportunity to teach, while the other has not)
• Considerations of funding (in a similar case of two students applying for one position, if one student is in the third year of enrollment and the other is in DCE status, a decision might be made to offer the position to the DCE student on the assumption that the third-year student will have other opportunities to precept)

This precepting process leaves the ultimate decision where it belongs, with the faculty instructor.