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Qualities possessed by Psychology graduates
from the University of Glasgow
August 2000,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow
This document sets out the qualities that the Department of Psychology
of the University of Glasgow believes to be possessed by its graduates, in
particular those completing the course between 1995 and 2000. It may usefully
be read in conjunction with the graduate's personal CV, their official
transcript of courses and grades, a reference written by a member of staff, and
perhaps a sample of the graduate's university work such as a copy of their
"maxi" project. While all the qualities discussed below would normally be
possessed by any of our graduates as a result of the learning activities
mentioned, they are not all individually tested and made a condition of
graduation: a personal reference can be expected to mention any variation in
attainment on a particular item, especially if written in response to a
specific query about it.
We are aiming to communicate the value of the degree to anyone interested in
our graduates, including those with no familiarity at all with psychology as a
discipline. The department would welcome any comments on how this document
might be improved for this purpose in clarity or any other respect,
particularly from prospective employers of our graduates.
As for most degrees at Scottish universities, psychology at Glasgow is a
four year degree. In the first two years, the student takes psychology as one
of three subjects. In the third year, a single honours student (the most
common case) studies only psychology, and completes the whole of the compulsory
core curriculum. The fourth year consists of a set of specialist options
selected by the student, and a substantial research project (the "maxi
project") whose topic is again largely selected by the student. This honours
degree programme may be carried out in the Faculty of Science (leading to
B.Sc.), Arts (leading to M.A.) or Social Science (leading to M.A. Soc. Sci.).
The degree is accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS), and the
consequent eligibility for membership is necessary for careers such as
Educational Psychologist, or Clinical Psychologist. For joint honours degrees
that include psychology, necessarily coverage is reduced, but nevertheless the
requirements for BPS recognition are covered, a maxi project completed, and all
the qualities described below except for specialist knowledge from the fourth
year options are generally acquired.
This document focuses on attainments from the latter two ("honours") years of
the degree. Graduates will vary in the additional attainments they acquired in
the first two years (for instance languages, computing courses, and so on), and
this will partly depend on the faculty they were in.
The department currently holds a 4 (the second highest rating) in the RAE
(research assessment exercise), and a 5 (the highest rating) in the TQA
(teaching quality assessment): the league tables imposed on university
departments. Because of the popularity of the subject among students, there is
competitive entry to honours (a hurdle between years two and three), so in
effect the department's students are pre-selected as above average for ability
and hard work.
The core areas of psychology taught in the degree are: Brain &
Behaviour (including how the physiology and anatomy of the brain and body
affect Psychology), Cognitive Psychology (including Memory and Language),
Comparative Learning and Cognition (relating animal to human psychology), Human
Development (how mental capacities develop from birth), Individual Differences
(Intelligence and Personality), Perception and Visual Cognition, Professional
Skills, Social Psychology, and Statistics & research design. These
compulsory topics, forming the guaranteed minimum breadth of psychological
knowledge required by the BPS, are examined in three of the papers listed on
the transcript (Psychology A, B, and C).
More specialised ("deeper") knowledge of particular topics is acquired in the
fourth year options chosen (see the appendix for the range). In addition,
individual graduates are likely to have picked up particular specialist
knowledge from their maxi project, particularly where this was done in close
association with one of the department's active research areas (see
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Acad/Psychology/research/).
Besides such conceptual knowledge, psychology graduates have also acquired
substantial knowledge and practice at applying empirical methods, particularly
that of controlled experiments but also of designing and using questionnaires,
and to a lesser extent interviews and other methods. Such practical methods
can be and are used in a wide range of contexts, including applied contexts
such as Human Computer Interaction, whether or not there is much theory for
such problems. The application of these methods of investigation are an
important area of practical knowledge, independently of the theoretical
knowledge.
The statistics teaching, which is another topic applicable beyond the range of
the theoretical topics taught, involves a 30 (Scotcat) credit course in the
first year which covers advanced analysis of variance, multivariate techniques,
and the hands-on use of statistical computer packages. This is reinforced by a
further (10 credit) course in the third year, and a series of practical
applications in labs and projects.
Every academic subject carries with it a particular approach to
understanding -- the discipline -- which varies widely from subject to subject,
but which a graduate often tends to carry over in approaching other areas of
work. T.K.Landauer, a psychologist who spent much of his career working with
those from quite other disciplines, suggested that the essence of what a
psychologist brings can be boiled down as follows: "There are two very
elementary but fundamental methodological facts that are taken for granted by
all experimental psychologists, but astonishingly often fail to be appreciated
by others. The first is that behavior is always quite variable between people
and between occasions. The second is that it is feasible to obtain objective
data on behavior." In other words, psychologists are trained to appreciate
that it is a mistake when dealing with people, as opposed say to a bit of
technology, to take a deterministic approach that assumes that what it does
once is what it will always do and that considering one example (e.g.
themselves) is enough; but equally that the opposite notion of free will and
hence complete unpredictability is generally mistaken, and that useful
predictions about behaviour and its degree of variability can nevertheless be
developed. Anyone with even informal experience of personnel, politics,
management, and so on will recognise the importance of understanding that
useful work can be done in the middle ground between determinism and free
will.
This view of the general intellectual character of psychology also points to
its distinctive features as a discipline. One pervasive aspect is its
application of some form of experimental method to all problems (this tends to
distinguish it from the other social sciences), despite the problems of
experiments with beings whose understanding of the experiment and experimenter
frequently has large effects. Perhaps more important for its value as a
general education, however, is that psychology frequently forces us to deal
simultaneously with fundamentally different kinds of evidence (whatever the
preferences of individual research specialists). For instance, a theory of
emotion must cope with physiological data (blushing, adrenalin surges that can
be measured chemically), individual cognitive data (how individuals' thoughts
and decisions change with emotion, what they report about their experience),
and social data (someone experiencing joy due to a success such as a strike in
bowling is about ten times more likely to smile if they are with companions,
suggesting that emotions are an evolutionarily ancient social coordination
mechanism). This need somehow to relate quite different kinds of evidence of
varying but not negligible value bearing on a single issue is a widespread
feature of professional life of most kinds, but is relatively unusual in an
academic subject.
A highly desirable general intellectual skill for any graduate is what is now
often called "critical thinking": the ability not just to reproduce and
explain concepts learned from others, but to decide how much weight should be
given them, by discerning and evaluating the extent to which they are
consistent with and supported by evidence and other ideas, (or conversely, how
much they are undermined by being inconsistent with other evidence and
opinions). This is directly built into some basic areas of the discipline,
where even introductory teaching in, for instance, social psychology, typically
consists of presenting, not a single dominant theory or "law", but the relative
abilities of alternative theories to explain the facts observed so far. On the
other hand, in other areas (e.g. those related to physiology) it behaves more
like a natural science: after a flurry of scrutiny and perhaps debate when new
theory or phenomena are published, general consensus is established in the
field, and findings become treated as "facts" or even "laws". Just as it is
unwise to accept all assertions uncritically, so it is unproductive to apply
scepticism to everything; useful critical thinking requires decisions about
the weight to be given each item. Most disciplines give far more practice at
one or the other, but psychology exposes its students to considerable amounts
of both because of its unusually wide range of types of subject matter. In
this department, critical thinking is further directly fostered by a series of
three "critical review" exercises requiring the student not just to summarise a
set of recently published papers, but to critique them. The aim is to develop
ability at independent assessment and comparison. (Our graduates may be able
to offer copies of one of their critical reviews on request.)
The department is very active in research, and this leads to a
substantial amount of research-led teaching. There are advantages from this
for instance in making the teaching content up to the minute, and from the
enthusiasm of researchers talking about their central interests. A deeper
advantage is that the teachers are equally learners, demonstrating by personal
example: a researcher is attempting to learn things no-one yet knows, both for
themselves and for the community as a whole. This is an important endpoint in
the types of learning an individual may do: from a child acquiring its first
language exactly from the people around it, to the independent learning of a
researcher seeking knowledge no-one else yet has. This is also important for
professionals and for organisations of all kinds. Finally, research-led
teaching introduces another important element: an apprenticeship mode of
learning. When students do their final year research project with a personal
supervisor they are in effect doing an apprenticeship in research, where they
learn partly by personal instruction, partly by their own practice, and partly
by imitation. While the research skills themselves will only be directly used
by a small subset of our graduates, this mode of learning is probably more
relevant than is usually acknowledged in many jobs. Even though formal
training courses are increasingly numerous in many workplaces, it remains true
that much learning on the job is by the implicit apprenticeship methods of
imitation, personal instruction, and trying it out with occasional supervision.
Our graduates have already successfully performed in that mode of learning.
Besides the general intellectual skills mentioned, our graduates are
equipped with a grounding in the following skills:
This was discussed at length under "General intellectual training".
Our graduates are required to write assessed essays throughout their
four years, about 19 in all, and thus they accumulate considerable practice at
planning and executing the writing of substantial pieces. This culminates in
their final year in the production of a critical review of about 6,000 words,
and the report on their maxi project, which is typically about 30 pages and
includes references, data tables, statistical analysis, and graphical
illustrations. (They may on request make these available for inspection.)
These final pieces of work are produced in circumstances similar to that of
many work places: they can draw on the use of computer spelling checkers and
human critics, but are working to a deadline and with other simultaneous
demands on their time.
Our graduates have been required to present at least three short talks
on their work, complete with visual aids and a time limit, to an audience of
limited attentiveness. Typically they regard this as very stressful, yet
perform competently in the view of staff (for whom giving and listening to
talks is a prominent feature of their professional life).
Our graduates have normally passed an IT training course (with a
separate certificate), covering the use of email, Word, and web browsers. They
were required to use email for much of their time as a standard departmental
communication medium. They were required to submit all their written work
outside exam rooms in word-processed form, including some use of tables and
charts. They are further trained and exercised in the use of at least one
statistics package, and in the use of online literature search software (e.g.
"BIDS"). They will normally have used the world wide web in various ways, as
the department maintains some information in that form, and some courses
require its use.
As noted above, the statistics course and required applications of it
mean that graduates have used calculators, spreadsheet, and statistical
software to process data, and to present numerical results in tables and
charts.
Psychology students will have had about one hour of lectures per day in
their last two years, the rest of their learning being largely self-organised.
In their maxi project, they will have had to manage all aspects of the work
themselves and get this to hang together into a successful whole. While there
are large variations between cases, the ratio of student work to supervisor
input on these projects is at least 10:1 and very often much greater.
In each of their first three years, graduates carried out practical work
in teams. In the third year, the success of the exercises depended heavily on
teamwork: on cooperation and the coordination of actions.
Our graduates have had to undertake library research both as part of the
regular courses, and for their project work and critical reviews. The latter
especially demand extracting useful information directly from the published
scientific literature.
We are happy to confirm in personal references that a particular
graduate has given us no reason to doubt their honesty, but in general a degree
course offers few opportunities for more definite observations or tests. The
exception is in acquiring and practising the desirable standards for dealing
with human participants (or "subjects") in empirical studies. All graduates
have received training in this, in line with BPS guidelines, and were required
as part of their research project to construct, and have accepted, an
application to an ethics committee covering their study. The difficulty of
getting such clearance varies greatly: for example, administering
questionnaires to other undergraduates is generally an issue of relatively low
sensitivity, while working with disturbed patients receiving treatment
elsewhere is a high sensitivity area.
The British Psychology Society, and its views on the value of psychology
degrees in general.
More information on the Department, and its degree courses.
This lists the entries that may appear on the transcripts for the latter
two years of study of those graduating in 2000. More details on the courses
are available in the course handbook, a version of which is available at:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Acad/Psychology/student/Level3/home3.htm
Note however that the handbook is modified each year to some extent, and will
only apply exactly to the courses being taught at the time it is consulted,
rather than in the past.
EX206J Psychology Senior Honours (Single)
EX206G Psychology Senior Honours (Combined)
EX206L Psychology Senior Honours (Principal)
EX91YT Psychology A:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Comparative Learning & Cognition
- Perception & visual cognition
EX91YX/XX Psychology B:
- Human Development
- Personality
- Social Psychology
EX91YY/XY Psychology C:
- Physiological Psychology
- Statistics
- Professional Skills
EX11WK Practical Paper
(Combining an exam on experimental design with two critical reviews)
EX91WJ Maxi Project
Year 4 options: students select 3 of these:
EX93AD Abnormal Psychology and Addictions
EX91ET Applying Psychology
EX96UN Biological Bases of Cognition and its Disorders
EX96VC Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics
EX91MM Perception and Visual Cognition
EX91MN Social Cognition
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