An exploration of project allocation procedures in UK psychology departments

Background: Psychology undergraduate projects are important to students’ learning experience and degree classification. A key factor in this process is the allocation of the student to the supervisor yet there is little research regarding how this is best accomplished for student satisfaction. In many cases this is done manually, with a human (project allocator) matching students’ interests with supervisors’ topics. However, some authors suggest applying an algorithm to match up student and supervisors according to rankings expressed by both sides, or matching by algorithm to student-only ranked preferences. Objective: The objective was to discover the extent to which a matching strategy was used, and ascertain what other procedures were adopted, in allocating psychology students to project supervisors. A second objective was to discover useful information about the overall project, such as when students received the name of the supervisor, or which methods and psychological areas students preferred. Thus, this study set out to audit departments regarding student and supervisor numbers, discover when and how students were being informed about the allocation and project, ascertain the variability of procedures involved in allocating students to topics/supervisors, and uncover which methods and topics students preferred. Method: Twenty-eight UK psychology departments completed a survey asking about aspects of their department, staff, allocation process, and students as they pertained to the process of allocating psychology students to projects. Most data were quantitative with some narrative responses sought. Results: Key findings were that departments often used more than one strategy. The four most common strategies, adopted by over 40% of departments were requiring a human project allocator to manually match students to topics/supervisors (~63%), students ranking project topics (~56%), and supervisors suggesting topics (~41%). An algorithm matching strategy was only adopted by a minority of departments (~15%). Twenty-five % of departments did not inform their students who their supervisor was until the final year of their degree, and respondents felt that their students preferred quantitative above qualitative methods, and clinical, health, and forensic compared to other modules. Conclusion: Although algorithmic strategies were used by some departments and may well be less onerous to implement, they were not that common compared to manual project allocation. Future research should explore the reasons for this and the overall usefulness of these strategies for student experience and grade outcomes. Finally, we hope that this paper will provide a information to those responsible for allocating students to supervisors to help them to decide how to approach this important task.