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Kind of. To audit means to assess the quality of. This is true in British English, but hiding free access to a course behind the pretence that the student is
by ectopod 5y ago
Kind of. To audit means to assess the quality of. This is true in British English, but hiding free access to a course behind the pretence that the student is auditing, not studying, is wholly American.
- jacobolus 5y agoAudit is Latin for "I hear" (think "auditorium", "audience", "audition"). If you think about it an audience with a lord, a legal "hearing", and an academic lecture are in many ways similar. Later the meaning of audit branched/changed, and one common modern sense of the word is to do a thorough examination of something, comparing results against specification. I speculate that it first became a technical specialized legal term (in a context where it was originally still about a hearing in court), and then mutated as it filtered back out to people who didn’t know the word’s origin. The "audit" in "audit an academic course" (meaning to attend the course without obtaining a credential) branched from the original sense of the word.