Douglas College has campuses in New Westminster and Coquitlam and sits inside British Columbia's transfer-oriented college system. That shapes what its students write. A large share are working through associate degrees and university-transfer coursework aimed at a BC university, and their written work is essays, lab reports and term papers assessed to the conventions of the receiving discipline.
Douglas also awards its own credentials: certificates, diplomas, associate degrees, post-degree, post-baccalaureate and graduate diplomas, and thirteen applied bachelor's degrees. Douglas describes all of its bachelor's degrees as applied, normally 120 credits over about four years, with hands-on learning in real workplaces.
Douglas does not award master's or doctoral degrees, so nothing here is written for a dissertation. But one program does require a real thesis, and it is worth setting out properly.
The Applied Psychology Honours thesis
The Bachelor of Arts in Applied Psychology, Honours is Douglas's research-degree pathway, aimed at students planning graduate school. It has the same structure as the regular BA, with a higher GPA requirement and three extra courses: PSYC 4390 Honours Seminar, and two semesters of supervised research.
PSYC 4400, Honours Thesis I
The first course is three credits, taught as independent study with a supervisor, with supervision provided weekly throughout the semester. You complete a literature review and an analysis of published empirical work, then submit a paper containing a summary of the previous literature and the design for an original research project.
The course guideline publishes an example evaluation scheme, which is a rare and useful thing to have in advance:
| Item | Share of grade |
|---|---|
| Draft of proposal presentation (introduction plus methods) | 20% |
| Letter of intent and CV | 10% |
| Final proposal or outline of paper | 30% |
| Annotated reading list | 20% |
| Effort, professionalism, preparedness | 10% |
| Communication and meetings | 10% |
Treat that as an example rather than a guarantee; the guideline says the supervisor sets the outcomes. Note that one of its listed learning outcomes is completing a Research Ethics Board application for research involving human subjects. The ethics application is coursework, not an afterthought.
PSYC 4410, Honours Thesis II
The second course is where you collect data using the methods approved in PSYC 4400, analyze and interpret results, and deliver two things: a publishable-quality APA style research paper describing the study, methods and results, and an oral presentation at a thesis defence.
Its example scheme is blunt about the weighting:
| Item | Share of grade |
|---|---|
| Draft methods section | 20% |
| Research presentation | 40% |
| Research paper | 40% |
The presentation is worth as much as the paper. Students consistently underweight this. Build the defence into your plan from the start rather than assembling slides in the final week.
Note also the prerequisite chain: PSYC 4400 is a prerequisite for PSYC 4410, and the psychology department handbook notes PSYC 3300 should be taken before enrolling in Honours Thesis II. A missed statistics course can cost you a year.
The honours thesis runs across two consecutive semesters with a fixed ethics approval step in the middle. There is no slack in it. If your REB application is returned for revisions, your data collection window shrinks, not the deadline.
If you are working on a long empirical write-up of this kind, our thesis writing support is built for that structure.
Getting in, and the deadline problem
Admission requires completion of at least 75 university-transferable credits with a GPA of 3.33 (or the Coordinator's permission), plus submission of the honours application including the signed agreement of a psychology faculty member who will supervise the thesis. You apply to the regular BA first, then to honours in your final year. There are two applications: one directly to the department and one through EducationPlanner BC.
To graduate you need PSYC 4400 and PSYC 4410 with at least a B+ average, and a minimum program GPA of 3.33.
Here is an honesty point. Douglas publishes three different application dates across its own sources. The program page says apply to the department by April 1 and then to the program by the application deadline, its FAQ section gives April 30, and the psychology department handbook says applications must be submitted to both the registrar and the department by May 1. These may reflect different steps or different years. Confirm the current dates directly with the BA Psychology and Honours Coordinator and do not plan around any single figure you read online, including this page.
Research ethics
Douglas states that no research involving human subjects, animals, biological hazards or radioactive materials may be undertaken without approval from the appropriate body.
For human participants, the REB process runs through the Cayuse Human Ethics platform. Every Douglas researcher, faculty and student alike, needs a Cayuse account, requested from [email protected].
Your application needs, at minimum:
- A copy of your Tri-Council CORE certificate (the TCPS 2 online tutorial at tcps2core.ca)
- Your consent form
- All questionnaires and test instruments
- All recruitment notices, emails, posters and advertisements
- Approval from any other REB, if applicable
Two features of the process matter for planning. First, the REB does an initial completeness and risk review and returns applications with comments before anything goes to delegated or full board review, so build in a revision round. Second, approval is generally granted for one year; research continuing beyond that needs an amendment request for an extension.
The terms of reference add a detail specific to you: under expedited review, reviews are normally completed by two reviewers and an analyst, but in the case of honours students, one reviewer and analyst conduct the review. Appeals of an REB decision go, unusually, to the Research Ethics Board of Langara College, with which Douglas has a formal agreement, and that decision is final.
Course-based research is treated differently. Research conducted by students under an instructor's supervision as part of an approved course outline does not currently need REB approval; the Faculty Education Committee reviews the generic research activities during curriculum review, and your instructor supplies REB-approved generic consent forms. Douglas explicitly describes individual approval as a planned future requirement, so confirm the position for your term rather than assuming the exemption still applies.
Academic integrity
The Academic Integrity Policy was created in 2020 and last revised in January 2024. All credit students complete an online academic integrity module in their first semester.
Four of its defined offences bear on research writing.
Plagiarism covers presenting the work, words, ideas, artistic imagery, arguments, calculations, illustrations or diagrams of another as your own without explicit or accurate citation. It explicitly includes work "in which the student has permitted someone else (a fellow student, tutor, mentor or teaching assistant, friend, etc.) to contribute unacknowledged."
Self-plagiarism is submitting your own work for credit in more than one course without the permission of the instructors, or resubmitting work for which credit has already been granted. If your thesis builds on a paper from an earlier course, get permission.
Misuse or misrepresentation of sources includes "massaging or manipulating research findings or data" and "suppressing aspects of findings or data in order to present conclusions in a light other than the research, taken as a whole, would support." For an empirical thesis, that is the definition of a non-significant result you were tempted to bury.
Unauthorized content generation (UCG) is defined as producing academic work, in whole or part, for academic credit, progression or award, "whether or not a payment or other favour is involved, using technological assistance such as, but not limited to, generative artificial intelligence and/or translation software."
Penalties run from a replacement assignment through grade reduction, a zero, failure of the course with an "FD" transcript notation, non-mastery with an "NMD" notation, suspension for a minimum of one additional semester, or a recommendation of expulsion. A third offence means the Responsible Administrator must recommend expulsion. There is no time limit on pursuing a breach, and discovery after a credential has been awarded may result in that credential being repealed.
AI, and the translation trap
The Library's academic integrity guide lists what Douglas counts as generative AI, and the list is broader than most students expect:
- Editing software, naming Grammarly
- Paraphrasing generators, naming Quillbot and Grammarly
- Text generators such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity
- Image generators such as DALL-E
- Predictive text, including suggestions in Outlook
The Library's rule is simple: unless your instructor specifically allows an AI tool, using it could violate the academic integrity policy, and where it is allowed you still have to cite it.
Read the UCG definition and the Library's list together. A paraphrasing tool run over a draft, or translation software used to produce the English you submit, sits inside what Douglas has defined as an offence. Ask your instructor before using either, in writing.
Citation and writing support
Douglas sets no college-wide citation style. The policy requires faculty to tell students which formats are acceptable in their discipline, so your course outline decides. The Library publishes full guides for APA 7th, MLA 9th and Chicago. Psychology honours theses use APA, per the PSYC 4410 guideline.
The Learning Centre provides writing support, and the Library publishes writing resources alongside its citation guides.
What everyone else writes
If you are not in an honours program, your research writing at Douglas is likely to be a term paper, a literature review, a case analysis, a practicum report, or an applied project with a workplace component. The rules above still apply in full: the same integrity policy, the same UCG definition, the same course-outline-governs-citation principle.
Students doing strong work in these formats can present it at Douglas College Student Research Day, or at Connecting Minds, the undergraduate research conference hosted annually by Kwantlen Polytechnic University. If a conference paper is where your work is heading, our research paper support works at that level.
Pre-submission checklist
- Supervisor agreement signed, if I am in an honours program
- CORE certificate obtained from tcps2core.ca and attached to my application
- Cayuse account requested from [email protected] well before I need it
- Consent form, instruments and recruitment materials all submitted with the ethics application
- Ethics approval received in writing before any data collection began
- Approval still within its one-year window, or an extension requested
- Citation style confirmed against my course outline, not assumed
- APA 7th applied throughout, if this is a psychology thesis
- Any reuse of my own earlier coursework has permission from every instructor involved
- No AI, paraphrasing or translation tool used beyond what my instructor permitted, and any permitted use cited
- All findings reported, including non-significant or inconvenient ones
- Oral defence prepared as seriously as the paper, given it can carry equal weight
What this guide could not confirm
- No published length for the Applied Psychology honours thesis, in words or pages.
- No published formatting specification beyond "APA style": no margins, binding, title page or preliminary page requirements.
- No published REB meeting schedule or turnaround time, so ask how long review currently takes before you build a timeline.
- No published defence format: length, audience, who examines, or how it is graded.
- Conflicting honours application deadlines across Douglas's own program page, its FAQ and the psychology handbook.
- No published thesis or capstone requirement in any other Douglas bachelor's degree, post-degree diploma or graduate diploma that this guide could verify; the Applied Criminology BA also advertises an honours option, so ask that department directly if it applies to you.
Where to get help
Your thesis supervisor and the program coordinator own scope, format and deadlines. The REB ([email protected]) handles ethics accounts, applications and extensions. The Library handles citation guides. The Learning Centre handles writing support.
Every gap in the list above is a short email now and a lost semester later.
