THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT ASHEVILLE FACULTY SENATE Senate Document Number 0993F Date of Senate Approval 12/16/93 Signature of Senate Chair ___________________________ Date _________________ Action of Vice Chancellor: Approval __________________________________ Date ____________________ Denied __________________________________ Date ____________________ Reasons for denial and suggested modifications: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Statement of Faculty Senate Action: APC DOCUMENT # 10: CHANGE TO PSYCHOLOGY COMPETENCY REQUIREMENT EFFECTIVE DATE: Fall Semester, 1994 WITHIN BOTH TRACKS IN PSYCHOLOGY (p. 185) DELETE: III. Other departmental requirements REPLACE WITH: III. Other departmental requirements - The capstone course, PSYC 390, History & Systems in Psychology, constitutes the demon- stration of competency in Psychology. RATIONALE: The Psychology Department traditionally has required graduating students to earn a passing percentage on a written exam as our demonstration of competency. On the recommendation of APC, we have modified our original proposal, using a Psychology GPA measure, to conform to the common UNCA practice of using perfor- mance within a single capstone course as our demonstration of competency. The new policy is identical to the one used for majors in Biology (although it is 2 courses), French, German, Mass Communication, Political Science (although it is 1 of 2 courses depending on track) and Spanish. After reviewing current Catalog entries, the Department decided against a specific grade requirement in the capstone course. Specific course grade requirements are rarely used by UNCA departments. Two departments, History and Sociology, require a grade of C in their capstone course, and one additional depart- ment, Management, requires a grade of C or better in a set of two courses. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: The impact of eliminating the current department competency policy will be extremely positive. In an effort to balance coverage of the broad domain of Psychology with the practical constraint of a reasonable time limit, the department exam is weighted more toward recall of specific facts rather than evalua- tion and synthesis of broad principles. Given the variation in undergraduate psychology curricula, this has been a particular problem for transfer students who completed basic psychology courses at other institutions. In addition, the capstone course requires students to integrate information from prior courses with the study of schools of thought and their derived princi- ples. We believe that performance on evaluations within this course is a better measure of students' overall ability to conceptualize and reason as psychologists.