Teaching psychology in Iceland

Urður Njarðvík & Daníel Þór Ólason Faculty of Psychology, School of Health

Sciences University of Iceland

Psychology education in IcelandPsychology has a long prehistory but a relatively short modern history in Iceland. From the founding of the University of Iceland (in 1911) psychology was taught as part of an introductory course required of all first year students. In 1971 a BA degree program in psychology was established at the University of Iceland. A BA program in psychology is now also available in two other universities, University of Akureyri (from 2003) and University of Reykjavik (from 2009). Only University of Iceland offers graduate programs in psychology. In all three universities are admission requirements having completed high school diploma and tuition fees are only required at the University of Reykjavík (approximately 1.950 Euros).

Faculty of Psychology at the University of IcelandPsychology was established as a faculty within the School of Health Sciences in 2008. Currently, psychology is among the most popular subjects at the university. At the moment the faculty includes approximately 600 students in the BS program and around 70 reading for professional or master’s degrees. We offer three different graduate programs: A MS in Research in Psychology; a professional degree (cand.psych) and a MS program in Social- and Work psychology. A PhD program was founded in 2006. Currently the academic staff is 12 so the teacher/student ratio is high or 1/56. The BS program includes 180 ECTS. The degree consists of: theories and foundation (26 ECTS), research methods and statistics (28 ECTS), core courses with assignments (86 ECTS), electives specialized or general (24 ECTS) and a BS thesis (16 ECTS). In our BS program we teach all main subjects of psychology including physiological, developmental, social, abnormal, perception, cognitive, personality, psychometrics and behavioral psychology. Within our core courses students are required to do lab exercises or small research projects and this training concludes with an independent research project as part of the BS thesis in the third year.

The challenge of increasing number of studentsThe policy of the University of Iceland is to admit all students with high-school diplomas, thus giving everyone a chance to try their subject of choice. As can be seen in Figure 1 below, psychology has been a very popular choice in the past 20 years and the number of new students is steadily climbing. Next Fall we have over 400 students enrolled which is a record number and makes the course one of the most popular on campus.

To meet the challenge of this large number of students the department requires students to pass Introduction to Psychology in order to proceed to the Spring semester and have a GPA of 6,0 (on a 10 pt scale) in order to proceed to the second year. About 60-65% of the students receive a passing grade in Introduction to Psychology in the first semester and about 50% of the initial group of students proceed to the second year. This very high drop out rate is probably best explained by the policy of admitting everyone which prevents us from preselecting students into the program.

Figure 2 shows the number of students graduating with a BS in psychology from 1974 to 2009. Although the numbers for graduates are considerably lower than for new students, the number of graduates is steadily increasing as well.

Career opportunities

Students who have finished the professional degree (cand.psych) pursue various careers as psychologists within the health and school system. Other graduate students (MS in research or social and work psychology) typically work within the private or public sectors, for example in human resource departments. BS graduates work in various disciplines both in private and public sectors.

It should be noted that due to the financial situation in Iceland employment is not as widely available as before. This also explains to some extent the recent increase in our student numbers.

Further information:

Dr. Urður Njarðvík (email: urdurn@hi.is) Dr. Daníel Þór Ólason (email: dto@hi.is)

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Figure 1. Number of students enrolled in Introduction to Psychology from 1990-2010

Figure 2. Number of students graduating with a BS in Psychology from 1974-2009