Transfer of Credit

Courses taken for a grade in a non-Tufts program or university (domestic or abroad) can be counted as a PSY course with approval from the Transfer of Credit committee in Psychology. Students may consult the Student Services website to help determine (unofficially) which courses might most easily transfer to Tufts.

Please keep in mind the following points as you are evaluating non-Tufts courses to take and request to transfer to Tufts:

• The Psychology Department will NOT approve transfer of credit for PSY 32, as this course must be taken at Tufts.
• If you are seeking a course to fulfill a specific requirement (e.g., a natural science course for the Distribution Requirement), try to select a non-Tufts course that is as close as possible to an existing Tufts course that already fulfills that specific requirement. Doing this will facilitate the process.
• Generally speaking, lower-level PSY courses tend to transfer in a more straightforward and expectable way as compared to higher-level PSY courses. Examples of lower-level courses include Introduction to Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Psychopathology/Abnormal Psychology, Social Psychology, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Emotion, Physiological Psychology, Perception, and Cognitive Psychology.
• It may not be necessary or possible to take major-related courses elsewhere, so it is important to think carefully in advance about how you will complete your major requirements.

After identifying courses of interest, students should then speak with their advisors or the Director of Undergraduate Studies if they have questions concerning courses that may transfer for the major.

The only way to officially transfer credit from another program to Tufts is via SIS. Please submit your transfer of credit requests well before you travel abroad and/or officially enroll elsewhere. Limiting the number of requests that you submit will expedite the processing time. Note: Decisions on credit transfer requests can take up to a month to process.

To petition for transfer of credit, students must access the SIS website and complete the transfer of credit request form. The form will request hyperlinks to the required information. If no web-link can be found, or if the course's description is in a foreign language, then a hard copy or scanned copy (translated into English) may be submitted instead.

Note that the Psychology Department can approve transfer of credit requests ONLY for PSY credits. For example, an Engineering Psychology major who wants to transfer credit for an Engineering course should not route their transfer of credit request through Psychology as we will not be able to approve it. Similarly, transfer of credit requests for a related fields course must go through SIS and must be approved by the department in question, not Psychology.

Tufts University uses the following numbers to designate Psychology courses that have been approved for transfer credit but do not match existing Tufts Psychology course content:

• PSY 310 (non-major credit)
• PSY 320 (lower-level elective credit)
• PSY 330 (100/200 level elective credit)

For more information on studying abroad, visit Tufts Global Education website.