Upon successful completion of this proficiency exam, students will be able to: describe the development of abnormal psychology, assessment and diagnosis approach, and research methods; analyze the symptoms, prevalence, causes, and treatments for disorders related to anxiety, somatic, mood/suicide, and eating; discuss the impact of psychology on physical health, symptoms, prevalence, causes, and treatments for sexual addiction, impulse control, and personality and schizophrenia-related disorders; investigate neuro-developmental and neuro-cognitive disorders and the legal and ethical issues associated with mental health service provision.

Upon successful completion of this proficiency exam, students will be able to: describe the skills that make a good teacher and how to evaluate an intentional teacher; break down how children develop cognitively, socially and emotionally; examine the impact of culture on teaching and learning; analyze the principles of behavioral and cognitive learning; determine how direct instruction, student-centered and constructivist approaches to instruction influence intentional teaching;  discuss the elements of effective instruction; investigate motivation for student performance; illustrate the characteristics of effective learning environments; identify learners with exceptionalities; and assess student learning through standardized tests.

Upon completion of this proficiency exam, students will be able to: distinguish how stress affects people physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and socially; judge the capacity for handling the demands that are part of today's world; practice how to prevent stress; discover how to reduce or cope successfully with unavoidable stress; appraise several different measures to assess personal stress; deduce that the body is designed to respond to acute stress predictably for one outcome-survival; evaluate the skills of “managing self-talk”, “stopping negative thoughts”, and “going with the flow” as mental tools to help prevent the activation of the stress response; assess values clarification to facilitate self-understanding; discover how to spend and save money to bring a lifetime of financial freedom; examine personal spiritual health; incorporate the behaviors of proper exercise, eating right, adequate sleep, and avoiding unhealthy behaviors to form a foundation of stress management; probe complementary and alternative therapies to expand roles in stress management and health promotion; formulate a plan that addresses a specific personality and the situations that determine the most effective tools to deal with stress.

Upon successful completion of this proficiency exam, students will be able to: describe how the history of psychology is studied, its philosophical influences, its physiological influences, and the contributions of its founders; explain the theoretical tenets and empirical methods of structuralism, functionalism and applied psychology; investigate the theory and methods used in Behaviorism and Gestalt Psychology; discuss the contributions of psychoanalytic and humanistic theory and method and the contemporary developments in psychology; and evaluate the relative merits of psychology's major schools of thought and key studies in the history of psychology.