Student review [#79736] for Psychology
at Tilburg University

The city is quite bad to live in and ugly, on top of very expensive.
The faculty of psychology is quite okay. Studying there has given me a good theoretical base. However, I have one major complaint, which is the way the university treats students individually. The student desk is the only way to obtain official documents from them (for example, the documents I needed to apply for a Master’s degre) and aside from the difficult office hours and long wait time on the phone, I was literally told upon requesting a very necessary document “sorry, we´re not going to do that for you, it is too much work for us”. when I suggested that I could put the document together myself and then just have it reviewed and stamped by them, she said htat it wouldn´t be valid. This resulted in me not being able to apply for Masters that year and taking a gap year, which is not the impact I ever thought a clerk would have on my life. Another complaint I have that resulted in a life-changing event is about my thesis. I chose to do a systematic review (within the Clinical Track) because it interested me, and I was fully informed that the program of the systematic review was still a pilot and subject to change. My supervisor was lovely and I had a great experience with her, that left me feeling like I learned something, and I was going to get a decent grade on said thesis that would then allow me to apply for a Clinical Psychology Masters in the Netherlands. For context, up until this point in my education, I had never failed an exam or a course as I always had average to high grades and I dedicate the appropriate time and effort to my studies. My thesis, on the other hand, was rather controversial. I received the grade I expected from my supervisor (which was within the range of my grades overall), whereas the second assessor failed me on half the criteria and didn’t put in the effort to provide appropriate feedback. As the two grades were too different from each other, my thesis was reviewed by a third assessor, who just did the averages between the grades of the first two assessors and included sad faces “:(” in her feedback for my months of work, which all resulted in a grade that still hinders me in my academic progress, two years later. Upon respectfully confronting the third assessor I was offered neither an explanation nor a justification (perhaps I had been misled during the process of writing my thesis) for the feedback (which at times was completely erroneous as it contradicted published and peer reviewed literature I had consulted while while writing), and I was told that my thesis would just not be reasessed. I would not still be going on about this if it wasn’t for the fact that I was just taught the findings of my thesis (which I was told was completely wrong) while studying for the master’s degree that I did manage to get into with my grades.
To sum up, while this faculty rigurously prepares students through content and theory, the students are nothing to them.