Removing warnings and errors in your Planner-generated Plan

Modified on Tue, 3 Oct, 2023 at 4:12 AM

Warnings and errors are indicated as red text or red icons in the Planner. Generally speaking, your Plan should contain no warnings. You should always pay attention to the warnings in your Plan and you should be able to correct your Plan to remove the warnings. An example of a warning is shown below:



One of the few times when you should expect a warning is you've planned for and received approval to take an overloaded term, which is the case for the last warning in the example above. The first warning, however, should be easy to resolve.


Removing and resolving warnings due to courses added to multiple sections

Warnings can also sometimes result when you add a course both to the Passed and Planned sections, as shows in the example below:




This type of warning may appear even though in the summary section, nothing seems to be out of order (see screenshot below). The likely cause for this warning is that you had added a course to both the Passed and Planned sections.


To remove warnings such as those, do the following:

  1. Review the PLANNED and PASSED sections and remove any courses that were duplicated across both sections. Then re-add the courses to only one section.
  2. If the previous step does not work, do the following:
    1. Back up your current Plan of Study by saving it as a PDF file
    2. Remove all the courses of the type(s) mentioned in the warning in both your Passed and Planned sections. In the example given above, remove all your GE Arts and Humanities, Major courses, and Elective courses from PLANNED and PASSED sections. 
    3. Confirm that the warnings have disappeared.
    4. Re-add the courses you removed to only one section (either PASSED or PLANNED).
  3. If the previous step does not work, do the following:
    1. Back up your current Plan of Study by saving it as a PDF file.
    2. Remove all the courses from the PASSED and PLANNED sections.
    3. Confirm that the warnings have disappeared.
    4. Refresh the page if needed.
    5. Re-add your courses.
      1. Add all the PASSED courses first.
      2. Review the courses that you still lack in the overview report.
      3. Add the missing courses one at a time to the PLANNED section and confirm that you do not generate any new warnings as a result.
  4. If you continue to have problems, you may need to regenerate your Plan of Study from scratch.


Since underloading is permitted during any term, you will not receive any warnings if you plan an underload. This feature is by design. 


Will I be warned if my Plan exceeds my Maximum Residency?

No. Please note that the Planner will not issue you a warning if your Plan exceeds your Maximum Residency. Being aware of the maximum residency is your responsibility as a student. You must keep this in mind and take responsibility for making sure that you don't violate the MRR. 


Other common issues and errors

The following are common issues that you might encounter when generating your Plan.


Screenshots from an incorrectly generated/printed PlanWhat's wrong What it should look like /
What you need to do

There is an overloaded term. You may have received permission to take an overloaded term, but the Planner will still warn you. Ignore this warning only if you received permission to take an overloaded term.

Excess courses were planned. Generally speaking, you should not take more courses than you need.

Go back to the beginning of this article to learn how to remove warnings.



This Plan is missing the colored markers to indicate whether courses have been Passed or Planned. When you print your Plan as PDF, make sure you enable printing of background colors and images.


There should be small colored squares next to the names of the courses.


There is a course missing from your Plan as indicated by the red square.

All courses should either be marked as yellow, green, or grey, never red. (See example in the previous row.)

Even if you are exempted from taking a course (for example, if you have received official confirmation that you are exempted from PE or exempted from NSTP),  you should still mark these courses as PASSED.

The Plan was not saved as a PDF file correctly. Refer to the walkthrough video in Using the Planner to generate your Plan of Study to review how to save your Plan of Study.


Was this article helpful?

That’s Great!

Thank you for your feedback

Sorry! We couldn't be helpful

Thank you for your feedback

Let us know how can we improve this article!

Select at least one of the reasons
CAPTCHA verification is required.

Feedback sent

We appreciate your effort and will try to fix the article