Posted on October 28, 2024
Short Announecement first: Starting in the Fall of 2025, the department will now be listed as CPSY in CAB and by the registrar and Dean of the College's office. So, all courses will be referred to as CPSY, not CLPS. Numbers will not change - so CPSY0010 is the same class as CLPS0010.
The goal of this post is to begin to describe our revised concentration. I want to give a little history so that students understand the process that we took and why we are revising our concentrations now. You can ignore this if you want.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences department had an external department review. This is a standard practice for academic departments every 10 years or so. Departments invite a group of scholars with administrative experience from other universities to provide feedback about research, teaching, and service. Faculty and students are both interviewed to provide feedback on how things are going in the department, so that the reviewers can provide recommendations to the committee.
One of the points that was raised by the external review was that students had some dissatisfaction with the availability of certain courses. This led us (the faculty) to begin a review of our own curriculum, particularly in comparison with other "close competitor" schools (some other Ivy League schools like Yale and Princeton, as well as other schools that are not in the Ivy League, but who have similarly sized departments with similar missions to Brown, like Stanford, Emory, and University of Chicago). We performed this review in the Fall of 2022.
What we found was that Brown had a curriculum that was different from everyone else. The open curriculum allowed for some flexibility, particularly in electives, but there were a lot of structured requirements, particularly at the introductory level. Because we only have so many faculty, this meant that we sometimes had to compromise on what certain faculty needed to teach in order to ensure that we always maintained our curriculum. Couple this with Brown's sabbatical policy and it created a lot of inflexibility in what we could offer. For example, because we always had to offer a large set of introductory classes every year, we couldn't always teach some of the more "in demand" seminars and advanced classes that students were using as capstones or using to help broaden their understanding of fields like clinical psychology or decision making.
Given these differences, we assembled a committee to begin to revise our concentrations. We started with the Behavioral Decision Science concentration,. We revised that concentration during the Spring of 2023, and those revisions were eventually approved by the CCC in the Fall of 2023. BDS concentrators have been using this revised concentration for about a year now.
In January 2024, the department's faculty had a retreat, and it was at this retreat that we decided to revise all of our concentrations. We started discussions there, but after we returned, in the Spring of 2024, a committee of four faculty (myself, Andrea Simmons, Bill Heindel, and Bertram Malle) started the process. We met with concentration advisors and some DUG leaders (particularly graduating seniors, who would not be affected by the changes, so could be more objective) to talk about what was needed and where students and faculty wanted to see change. In the end, we came up with a plan to revise all four of the concentrations (including BDS, which we felt needed some further revisions). These revisions were sent to the CCC in April of 2024. They were approved in October, and we are now rolling them out to students, particularly students declaring their concentration in the Spring of 2025.
In the next four blog posts, I'm going to describe these changes to each of the concentrations: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Behavioral Decision Sciences. The main difference among them is that the new requirements afford students with a lot more flexibility in how they can choose courses to meet the requirements of some of our concentration. The new requirements are more inclusive, particularly at the foundational level. There are, however, a few ground rules (I'm going to go over them in most of the posts, so this might be repetitive), so please read all of these (even if you might not think it’s relevant to you) before you go to your specific concentration (linked below).
0) None of these changes will be placed in ASK until the Spring. If you can hold off your concentration declaration until the Spring, please do so. Don't declare now. Declare in the spring. INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT FOR MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF 2027.
1) These changes start with students graduating in the Spring of 2026. Students who intend to graduate in Spring of 2025 or Fall of 2025 are not grand-parented into these new requirements. For graduating seniors, you are still going to use the previous requirements (sorry, this is the Brown Registrar's rules, not ours). So, if you are a graduating senior this academic year or if you are a 2025.5-er, these posts do not apply to you. You should just keep going with your existing, approved concentration declaration.
2) If you are a current member of the class of 2027 (a current sophomore), class of 2028 (a current first-year student), or for all subsequent classes, these new requirements apply to you. The old requirements do not. HOWEVER, the new requirements subsume the old requirements - that means that if you already have an approved concentration, you are already satisfies the new requirements. You don't have to do anything. There's no configuration of the previous requirements for any concentration that does not satisfy the new requirements. There are no additional or extra requirements. You don’t have to take any additional credits. There are just some…changes.
3) The last point that I just made helps explain things if you are a current junior (a member of the class of 2026). If you have an approved concentration declaration, you do not have to do anything. You are fine. You are done. You are still approved. Take your classes and fulfill the concentration you have declared. If you want to change your concentration declaration, you must talk with your concentration advisor. And again, I will emphasize this: GO TO THEIR OFFICE HOURS. Do not just email them. Physically go and talk with them. If you are thinking of declaring a concentration in the department (for example, if you are thinking of declaring a second concentration now, you would have to satisfy the new requirements), you really must speak to a concentration advisor before you declare, particularly to work through your electives and capstone.
4) If you are a double concentrator (regardless of class year), one thing that is unchanged is the number of classes that you can use to apply to concentration requirements for each concentration. For all CoPSY concentrations, that number is still two. And that is the maximum. And that's for all requirements. (N.B. I get asked about this a lot). And yes, we know about the list of courses put forward by the Dean of the College that could be exceptions (IYKYK). But the key word there is could. That document also makes it clear that it is up to the department. The Cognitive and Psychological Sciences department does not think these courses should be exceptions, so the maximum for a double concentrator in our department is still two, even if the other department in which you are concentrating allows those courses.
5) This goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway), we do not allow students to double concentrate in the department (that is, you can't double concentrate in psychology and cognitive science). Linguistics, however, is now a separate program. Honestly, at the writing of this entry, no one has asked to double concentrate in Linguistics and one of the four concentrations in our department. But I think this is now possible. (Who wants to be a trendsetter? For the record, I was the first person in the history of Swarthmore College to double major in Psychology and Computer Science - a fact that they advertised in the computer science department until about 2017 - so I appreciate this kind of trivia).
6) What you will see in the new requirements is that there are some classes that are emphasized like CPSY0900 (Statistics) and CPSY1900 (Research Methods). These courses will be taught every semester. Most foundational courses will be taught every 2 out of 3 years (some more frequently, some less so; this is an average). And most advanced (1000-level) classes will be taught every other year or once every three years. We will be planning our curriculum in 3-year increments starting in Fall 2025, so we'll have a relatively decent idea about what courses will and will not be offered in the next few years. I'll do a post about that when it becomes available in the Spring of 2025 (PLEASE remember that it takes us about 4 months to plan what courses we are going to teach in the next academic year; we start the process in November and end in February).
OK, that's all for now. What you want to do now is jump to an entry for your concentration (or the concentration that you are interested in. Remember, if you haven't read this entry about deciding among our concentrations and the differences among Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, and BDS, feel free to do so, as well as any of the other entries on the home page that are related to advising in the Cognitive and Psychological Sciences department ("CPSY")
As always, if you have suggestions for entries you want me to write, feel free to email me.
Information about the new Psychology Concentration
Information about the new Cognitive Science Concentration
Information about the new Cognitive Neuroscience Concentration
Information about the new Behavioral Decision Sciences Concentration