Petition - Request for a Transfer Course to Meet a Requirement

Request for Adjustment of Academic Record (RAAR; petition)

A RAAR or petition can be filed when a course does not count toward a requirement after being reviewed by SDSU. Courses that have current articulation agreements are reviewed automatically. If courses come from a school with whom SDSU has not had an articulation agreement (overall or for specific courses), they will be reviewed manually.

If after these steps the course is not considered equivalent to one at SDSU, psychology students may request to file a petition through Psychology Advising for:

  • Courses relevant to prep, major or minor psychology requirements (including BIOL 100 equivalents)
  • Courses to meet GEs, graduation requirements, etc.

However, Psychology Advising cannot file a petition for a student from a different major or minor, even if it concerns a psychology course. For example, Public Health requires students to take PSY 101. If a public health major transfers a course in from a different school and they want the course to meet the prep for major requirement for Public Health, then they need to visit that advising department. The reason is because it is up to their major if the psychology transfer class meets the purposes of prep for the major, not if it is actually equivalent to PSY 101 at SDSU.

 

Processing of a Petition

A Psychology peer advisor will submit an internal Google Form to have potential petitions reviewed. The Psychology Department provides decisions relevant to Psychology requirements only. Psychology Advising submits petitions to the Evaluations Unit for SDSU for other course types. Petitions can take up to 2 weeks to be reviewed in Psychology, then they are sent to Evaluations for processing. Students will be contacted in the event that there is a question about the petition or if it is denied. Students should allow at least 6-8 weeks before the petitioned change appears on their degree evaluation (unless they have applied to graduate, in which case the turn-around time is typically shorter).

 

Situations that Can be Petitioned in Psychology

  • Transfer courses (e.g., 4-year, CC, study abroad) to be equivalent to a PSY major or minor course.
    • To be approved, students must submit a syllabus and the courses must overlap substantially in content. Optimally, a syllabus would be from the semester that you took or will take the course or within a year of that semester. In case your former professor is not accessible, you can often obtain a syllabus by contacting the psychology department at the institution where you took the course.
    • Upper-division transfer courses are the only type that can be considered equivalent to an upper-division SDSU course or used to meet an upper-division requirement. However, an upper-division transfer course may be used to clear a lower-division, PSY prep for the major requirement, if the content of the courses overlaps substantially.

 

  • Upper-division PSY courses to count toward upper-division PSY additional units. For this type of petition, the course from another school would be one that SDSU does not offer, e.g., Political Psychology. Keep in mind, we only need to file a petition if the course does not already fall under additional units (AU) on the degree evaluation. Study abroad courses may or may not automatically go toward AU depending on if they had been approved by the department before students went abroad.

 

  • Release UD course from PSY major to second major or minor. Sometimes students will have a major and minor for which the same course can meet a potential UD requirement. However, because upper-division courses are not allowed to satisfy requirements for a student's major and a minor (or across 2 majors), the course will be applied to only one department. The course will count toward the major by default (or the primary major if a double major). Students can petition a course to be released from where it 'landed' on their degree evaluation to a different major or minor. The petition has to be filed from whichever department 'owns' the course, i.e., under which major or minor it appears on the evaluation.

 

 

Situations that Cannot be Petitioned in Psychology

  • Concurrent enrollment in a class and its prerequisite class.
  • Community college (or lower-division) courses can never be equivalent to UD courses. This is a policy at most universities—incoming courses must stay at the 'level' that they were offered at the granting university (e.g., if they took Social PSY at a CC it cannot equate to our UD Social PSY at SDSU).
  • Lower-division community college coursework to count for major prep if the student did not receive the needed grade for their degree path.