Course restructuring: Amputating psychology

Not my finest title for a post but whatever.

I was disturbed when I discovered that Temasek Poly overhauled its curriculum recently and made a lot of changes to the psychology programme I came from that I don't agree with.

With a misty look in my eye, I say, "It was better during my time."

When I was there, we had a requirement called Cross-Disciplinary Subjects (CDS) in which we had to take three modules which were unrelated to our diploma. In NUS, we have something similar known as Unrestricted Electives.

Apparently, CDS is no more. It has been replaced by a strengthened TP Fundamentals component. We had this Fundamentals bit too, but it wasn't called Fundamentals then. It was known as TP Core.

Semantics, semantics.

Last time, TP Core taught us things like public speaking, academic writing, and professional communication skills. And we had the dreaded Leadership: Essential Attributes and Practice (LEAP) levels one through three, of course.

But now, they have all these shiny new modules such as Career Readiness (hey, Roots & Wings!), which is split into three separate modules numbered one through three just like LEAP, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Persuasive Communication (I wonder if they cover Pathos, Ethos, and Logos...), Communication & Information Literacy (fake news?), Sports & Wellness, Current Issues & Critical Thinking, and Global Studies.

And students have to choose one of three modules with these highfalutin names: Managing Diversity at Work, Global Citizenship & Community Development, or Expressions of Culture. (Shoutout to States Times Review, who may want to turn this into a story with the headline: "Polytechnic Brainwashing Students into Accepting Influx of Foreigners".)

By getting rid of CDS, the institution has severely hampered students' freedom to explore areas that they have interest in. Previously, we could select which CDS we wanted to take, so we would generally go for things that we felt we might like. That was how I first got to study English phonetics, which helped me a lot when I took a basic English module in NUS.

Now, students have very little choice. Everything in TP Fundamentals is fixed except for the decision on which of the highfalutin "cultural" modules I mentioned above to opt for.

Coming from a university and faculty system which gives me so much leeway to "build my own degree", such restrictiveness is anathema to me.

At least there's still LEAP, which is probably the most useful module in the entire Singapore tertiary education system. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

But what really shocked me was the total deletion of the subject Physiological Psychology from the Diploma Core part of the psychology programme.

Although I don't major in Psychology in NUS, I know for a fact that psychology majors must complete the following Essential modules: Biological Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Abnormal Psychology. These represent the five pillars of psychology upon which the whole discipline rests.

So to remove Physiological Psychology (another name for Biological Psychology) from the syllabus is like cutting off one of the legs that psychology stands on, hence the title of this post.

The problem with biological psychology is that it's a bitter pill: you suffer a lot when you have to study it because of all the memorising involved in remembering the names and functions of the various structures in the brain and nervous system, but in the long term it benefits you greatly because you know many facts and understand stuff about the human body that most people will never even imagine. When I did the basic Psychology module in NUS, I sure was glad for having taken Physiological Psychology before!

I think future cohorts of students graduating from the psychology diploma will be poorer for this, because it means they won't have as much of a headstart in their psychology degree courses compared to their peers from junior college or other diploma programmes.

To make matters worse, Abnormal Psychology, another of psychology's "legs", was made a Diploma Elective where it was previously a Diploma Core subject. This means that only students who choose to study it will take the module.

I'm struggling to comprehend it! When there's justification to make things compulsory, they make it optional. But in other parts of the programme like TP Fundamentals, they are so heavy-handed in dictating what students should take.

Couldn't they have left well enough alone? Haven't they heard the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?