Ethical Principles and Standards That Inform Educational Gatekeeping Practices in Psychology

Abstract

Educational gatekeeping functions in psychology serve to assess, remediate, and/or dismiss students and trainees with problematic professional competencies (STPPC). Recently, professional psychology graduate programs have increasingly focused on problems with professional competency, and they have begun to implement formal procedures to intervene with STPPC (Rubin et al., 2007). However, there has been considerably less literature addressing the ethics and ethical considerations of instituting these gatekeeping functions, especially in different stages of education and training in psychology. The American Psychological Association (APA; 2002) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (Ethics Code) offers faculty and supervisors ethical principles and obligatory standards that provide guidance about how to implement highly ethical gatekeeping practices. The purpose of this article is to highlight the major ethical issues and dilemmas that faculty and supervisors may face when intervening with STPPC and provide recommendations for ethical gatekeeping practices that are inspired by the APA Ethics Code.

Keywords:

• ethics
• gatekeeping
• competence
• competence problems
• undergraduate
• graduate
• internship
• postdoctoral

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express gratitude to Nan R. Presser for providing education and training on the ethics of psychology, as well as for her invaluable feedback during the development of this article. I am also grateful to APA Ethics Committee members Linda Forrest, Nadya Fouad, and Jennifer Cornish for their time, insight, and guidance on revisions of this paper.