Sixth Revision of CPA Accreditation Standards Approved
The Sixth Revision of the CPA’s Accreditation Standards for Doctoral and Residency Programs in Professional Psychology (the Standards) has been approved by the CPA Board of Directors and was presented at the CPA’s 84th annual convention in June.
This revision is the result of a six-year process led by the CPA’s Accreditation Panel and Standards Review Committee, including surveys, public consultation, and focused consultations with CPA sections and groups external to the CPA.
The major changes to the Standards primarily revolve around increasing access to professional psychology, particularly for those persons and peoples that have not been well-represented in the past. This was done by strengthening Standards regarding student support and resident compensation (including indexing resident compensation to local living wages), integrating Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Social Justice, Human Rights, and Reconciliation into training, faculty, and program Standards, broadening the eligibility requirements for programs to be able to apply for accreditation (thus reducing barriers for some of those programs’ students to access accredited residency placements), and providing additional flexibility for programs to offer some proportion of their training through electronically-mediated or distance technology.
This revision also provides a number of smaller changes to the Standards, including the use of gender-inclusive language, the allowance for some proportion of asynchronous supervision, the inclusion of psychopharmacology as a general psychology core content area, and the additional of supporting documentation (e.g., a glossary of terms, reference documents).
To learn more about the standards revision process, click here.
To read the new accreditation standards, click here.
Accreditation News
“Accreditation Update” newsletter Summer/Fall 2021