Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Psychology

Psychology is concerned with the study of human behaviour and experience. People trained in psychology work in a wide variety of areas in health, education, industry, commerce, welfare and government.

Psychology has been a part of a tradition of academic excellence and research achievement at the University of Melbourne since the late 1800s. The Department of Psychology, formally established in 1946, is the single department in the School of Behavioural Science, and is part of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. It is one of the largest departments of psychology in Australia.

The Department of Psychology undergraduate program has been designed to provide students with flexibility and choice in coursework areas and offers a broad range of subjects aimed at providing a thorough and extensive grounding in the discipline.

The objective of the fourth year program is to help students acquire the knowledge, skills, and scholarship necessary for achieving excellence in psychology. More specifically, the fourth year program is designed to provide students with the opportunities to learn the intellectual background, ethical principles, and content areas of psychology as a scientific discipline, and to acquire the general skills for:

• critically analysing the existing knowledge about a research topic prior to one's own research (eg. sophisticated conceptual analysis of relevant content area/literature/intervention program etc., critical appraisal of one's own and others' research, generation of productive research questions);
• constructing a research plan (eg. research design, methods of observation) to address one's research question;
• executing one's research plan adequately to obtain data;
• analysing the data so as to address the research questions appropriately; and
• discussing the implications of the results coherently within the context of the existing knowledge relevant to the research topic.

The course structure for fourth year involves the completion of three compulsory subjects (which includes the research project), and two elective subjects.

Assessment Requirements

To qualify for the BSc (Honours) degree students must:

• pass 100 points at the honours level (or a level deemed appropriate for an honours student); and
• achieve an overall weighted average of at least 65 percent for their honours studies.

Students are not allowed to repeat an honours subject/component for which they have received a mark of less than 50 percent.

Compulsory Subjects

Elective Subjects

To be eligible to enter honours you must satisfy both the Faculty of Science entry requirements and the requirements of the Department of Psychology.

Faculty of Science entry requirements

There are two faculty entry requirements which must be satisfied:

1. Admission to the BSc (Honours) requires completion of the BSc, BBiomedSc, BASc or equivalent qualification recognised by the Faculty of Science. The only exception to this is for those applicants currently enrolled in a BSc combined course at the University of Melbourne. These applicants need to have completed at least 300 course points, within which the science requirements of their combined course need to have been satisfied.

2. Graduates of the University of Melbourne must normally have a Science Honours Score of at least 65 percent, see Faculty Honours Score. Applicants who have completed their degree at other institutions must demonstrate that they have achieved an average of 65 percent for the third year science subjects they have studied.

Faculty Honours Score

To determine students' eligibility for admission to the honours programs of the Faculty of Science the faculty calculates a Science Honours Score (SHS) which is calculated as follows:

1. For graduates of the BSc single degree or the BBiomedSc, their SHS is the weighted average mark of their best 87.5 points of science study at 300-level.

2. For graduates of a BSc combined course or the BASc, or students who are still enrolled in a BSc combined course and have completed at least 300 points within which the requirements of the BSc have been satisfied, their SHS is the weighted average mark of completed science subjects at 300-level, or their best 87.5 points of science study at 300-level, whichever is greater.

For students and graduates of the BASc and BA/BSc courses, History and Philosophy of Science subjects and Geography subjects must count towards the Arts component of their combined degree and therefore they are not considered in calculating their SHS.

Department of Psychology entry requirements

In addition to satisfying the Faculty of Science entry requirements, students interested in entering the psychology honours program need to have completed an Australian Psychological Society accredited three-year sequence in psychology with at least a weighted average grade of H2B in subjects specified by the Department of Psychology.

Further information about honours in Psychology is available at: http://www.psych.unimelb.edu.au/courses/fourthyear/