"First-Year" Writing at AUS?

To call the English-language writing requirement here "first-year composition" (as it's often called in the U.S.) would be a misnomer, mainly because most students end up in a writing course every semester for their first two years, and sometimes beyond.  Depending on performance on various assessments, a fairly common experience is to take a two-course sequence in academic writing, offered by the Department of Writing Studies, during the first year and then, sophomore year, students move over to the Department of English, and take a research writing course one semester and, often, an English for special purposes (professional writing) course the other.

If they pass into the lower writing studies course, that tacks on one more semester of writing.  If they take the public speaking course that the English Department offers, that's one more semester of communication-across-the-disciplines.  Plus, a relatively new Writing Across the Curriculum requirement means that all majors have a writing-intensive upper-level course, so THAT is one more semester of writing as well.

Three years of coursework in writing isn't uncommon.