Top-ranking undergraduate education is the foundation of top-ranking universities. It is necessary to reform the teaching of civil engineering courses to meet the needs of training civil engineering composite talents, change the traditional “teacher-centered” teaching mode and explore a teaching mode of “student-centered”. Taking the seismic design course of building structure as an example, this paper carries out teaching reform that focused on the shortcomings of the current teaching and combined with the characteristics of the course such as more content, fewer class hours and greater teaching difficulty from teaching contents, teaching methods, practice links and evaluation system, based on the “Student-Centered” teaching concept. First, adjust the teaching mode and teaching methods, encourage and guide students to learn independently after class to solve the problem of less class but more content. Second, use a variety of means to assist teaching to stimulate students" interest in learning. Third, pay attention to practical teaching and enhance students" comprehensive application ability and innovative practice ability. Fourth, perfect the teaching evaluation system, introduce the process index into the evaluation system, and evaluate the teaching work at the same time to form a benign interaction between teachers and students. According to the comparison of teaching effects before and after the teaching reform, the analysis results show that the reform measures based on SC not only fully mobilize students" learning enthusiasm, enhance their autonomous learning ability, improve students" learning achievement, but also promote teachers" teaching level and training quality. The teaching reform has achieved good teaching results, hoping to be helpful to the curriculum reform of other civil engineering majors.