UC System

Table of Contents

Transferring to a UC school has its own rules and procedures. In addition to the information on this site, UC offers a Transfer Admission Planner tool to help you track and plan your coursework while at Palomar. You should also use Assist.org to learn the exact Palomar General Education AND Psychology courses that transfer to the UC schools you are interested in. Remember – each school has its own requirements and some (like UCSD) have special agreements with Palomar. As noted on the CSU Transfer page, completion of the IGETC pathway will help ensure that you are satisfying the requirements for transfer to the UC system.

Junior-Level Transfer

Most students transferring from a community college have completed all of their lower division work, which would be 60 semester units. Doing so will mean you enter UC as a junior. This is the preferred approach with the greatest chance of acceptance. Specific requirements for a junior-level transfer are:

Complete 60 semester units of transferable college credit with a GPA of at least 2.4 (2.8 if you are a non-resident). No more than 14 of those units may be taken as Pass/Not Pass.
Complete the following courses (each course must be 3 or more units), earning a C or better in each:
1. Two transferable college courses in English Composition.
2. One transferable college course in mathematical concepts and quantitative reasoning
3. Four transferable college courses from at least two of the following areas (in other words, you cannot take them all from a single area):
  1. arts and humanities
  2. social and behavioral sciences (psychology!)
  3. physical and biological sciences

Now, completing the above does not guarantee you admission to the campus or major of your choice. In fact, the IGETC pathway will help you satisfy these minimum requirements but will also round out your general education courses as you work towards those 60 semester units. To maximize your chances, you also want to work towards and specific requirements needed for your campus and/or major. Start early!!! Psychology requirements vary from campus to campus, so if you have any idea of what schools you might want to transfer to, check them out and start planning on completing those requirements.

For psychology major, almost all campuses will require you to have taken what they call “General Psychology” (Psych 100 – Introductory Psychology here at Palomar) and Statistics (Psy 205 – Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences). The remainder of your major prep will vary from school to school.

Lower-Division Transfer

A junior-level transfer is your best option because it increases the chances of you being accepted at a UC school, but a limited number of students are also accepted who have not yet reached junior status, but this is more rare. To be eligible for such a transfer (again, no guarantee), you must have been eligible for admission to UC when you graduated from high school. This means you satisfied all the subject, examination, and scholarship (grade and GPA!) requirements.

If you met the scholarship requirements but not the subject requirements (subject requirements specify the type and number of courses in various areas such as science, English, and math that you must have completed), you will need to finish up those courses to be eligible for transfer.