To: College Curriculum Committee
From: Charlene Christie, Chair of Psychology
We have recently made a series of changes to some of the required courses in the Psychology major. All
of these course changes were approved by the Dean, and will be in place in the Fall 2013 semester.
However, these changes in pre-requisites have altered the sequence of courses taken by Psychology
majors. We wish to have this reflected on advisement documents, and to make these changes known to
any other departments who may be impacted by these modifications.
1. PSYC222 (Research Methods II) – this is the second course in a year-long research methods
sequence that all Psychology majors are required to take. This course originally carried the WS2
attribute, but this Gen Ed attribute was dropped this semester. The existing pre-requisites for
this course were a) earning a “C” or better in Psy221 and b) having passed the college writing
exam. We have chosen to add another pre-requisite in order to make sure that students are
prepared for the type and caliber of work that is required in this course: c) having completed a
WS2 class. Given that this is no longer a writing-intensive course, we also changed this from a
4-credit to a 3-credit course.
2. 300-level courses – these upper level courses are typically formatted as senior seminar types of
classes, and psychology majors are required to take at least two courses from this grouping. The
existing pre-requisite for all of these courses was having earned a “C” or better in Psy221.
However, since many of these courses assume working knowledge of research methodologies
and statistics, we have chosen to change this pre-requisite to having earned a “C” or better in
both Psy221 and 222 (that is, students need to have successfully completed the entire year-long
research methods sequence).
The above changes have necessitated a formal change to the curriculum as well (which will need to be
approved by the committee). By changing PSYC222 from a 4-cr to 3-cr course, we have changed the
total number of required credits for the Psychology major from 34 to 33. So we need the requirements
to reflect that the total number of required credits in the psychology major is now 33cr.