Sociology

Transfer Credits

In order to receive transfer credit for courses taken at other institutions, you need to receive prior approval from the department chair at Reed.

To do so:

  1. Obtain copies of the course catalog description, syllabus and any other course materials (e.g., assignments, handouts) that you can. Note that it is difficult and sometimes impossible to assess the content or quality of the courses from catalog descriptions alone.
  2. Find out from the registrar's office at Reed how many credits you can expect to receive for the course(s) you intend to take. In order to answer this question, the Registrar needs to know whether courses to be transferred are offered on the semester system or the quarter system.
  3. Next, you need the signature of the department chair. We cannot sign blank lines with "sociology courses" written next to them, so be sure to have the form filled out in detail by the time you are at the signature stage.

Group and Divisional Requirements

If you want to fulfill Group B or divisional requirements with the course you are taking at another institution, you will need to sign up for a course that surveys major sociological approaches and is comparable to the type of upper-division course that you would take at Reed to fulfill Group or Divisional requirements.

Group B regulations in History, Social Sciences, and Psychology are very specific. They require that you take a minimum of two units in the same department, subject to the specifications laid out in the Reed catalog.

Do not assume that other schools' "introductory" courses will qualify for sociology credit at Reed or satisfy prerequisites for our upper division courses. In many cases, such courses are not comparable to what the Reed sociology department and peer institutions offer and expect. Courses that do not survey dominant sociological approaches or that self-identify as "interdisciplinary" can't count toward divisional credit as "introductory sociology courses." You can still take courses that aren't sociological but happen to be offered by a sociology department, but they won't serve the purpose intended by Reed divisional or group requirements. Students who are considering courses for transfer credit should look at our introductory syllabus to get an idea of what the department offers and expects.

On the matter of selecting appropriate upper level sociology courses to fulfill your second Reed Group B credit --again, it/they should be some acceptable approximation of what Reed is offering. We urge you to take general sociological methods courses and/or sociological theory if something like that is being offered by the university where you want to study. Otherwise, you can usually take any course of the form "The Sociology of X" that is described as reviewing sociological theories. Again, any course that calls itself or its approach "interdisciplinary" is just that. Therefore, it can't be credited as a "sociology" course.