Many of you have asked about which university psychology departments I would recommend. There are a lot of things to take into account when you choose your university, and the reputation of the department is only one of them. However for your information, here are the ratings of the major Scottish psych departments from the RAE 2008 (see www.rae.ac.uk for more info). I have included Cambridge, Sheffield, Bangor and Ulster for comparison!

(Red=% of staff who are internationally acclaimed, top of their field; lilac=% who are internationally reknowned but not quite as good as the reds, and the next two numbers are the divisions below that! The number in brackets is the number of staff, full time equivalent, who were included.)

St Andrews (33.90) 20 45 35 0

Glasgow (26.00) 20 40 40 0

Edinburgh (38.51) 15 45 35 5

Aberdeen (26.00) 5 45 40 10

Dundee (22.00) 5 30 50 15

Stirling (24.20) 5 10 55 30

Strath (17.00) 0 30 45 25

Heriot Watt (9.20) 0 5 30 65

Glasgow Cal (18.70) 0 10 40 50

Abertay (10.00) 0 15 40 45

Bangor (39.00) 20 45 25 10

Ulster (27.00) 5 20 45 30

Sheffield (40.45) 15 45 35 5

Cambridge (24.00) 35 50 15 0

RI: Sections

Here's a brief summary of the sections in an RI write-up, and how many marks they are worth:

Abstract: 5
Introduction: 10
Method: 8
Results: 8
Discussion: 12
References: 3

Plus 4 marks for style and presentation, taking the total to 50.

RI: Pitfalls

As you begin the process of writing up your RI (and practice RI), I would like to hightlight some common pitfalls: places where people often mess up and lose marks unneccesarily...

• Missing out the references section, or putting in a mixture of references and bibliography (book list e.g. Higher Psychology textbooks).
• Major flaws in the results section, e.g. missing or unclear graphs, not labelling tables and graphs, not explaining what statistics have been used, failing to put raw data and calculations into an appendix.
• Incorrect or incomplete hypotheses - your teacher can check these for you.
• Not sticking to the SQA 'brief' - this document describes what you should do in your study. If you don't follow it, you could lose several marks.
• Failing to include a conclusion, and suggestions for future research studies.
  

None of these flaws is big on its own, but collectively they could bring a mark down from an 'A' to a 'C'.

Top ten psychology studies

Here's a link to a site which has a lot of interesting 'top tens' and other accessible articles.
In this one they present a selection of 10 great psychology studies, and invite you to vote for the best one. You should be familiar with at least some of these from our course so far!

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/top-ten-psychology-studies.php

Notice board

Hi, since I spent all of...hmm, half an hour at least making the Psychology notice board looking nice for open day, I invite you all to come up to C8 and look at it! If you can't find the time, here is a picture of what it looks like:

If you can guess the theme, you win a stress dot ;)