Psychology Teachers, Postsecondary

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half the load — 200-seat Intro Psych lectures on classical conditioning, multiple-choice item banks, textbook-aligned slide decks, rubric-scored essays on the Milgram studies — is standardized content a model reproduces at passing quality, while the surviving half (running a live seminar where students argue about replication failures, sitting with an undergrad thesis student through IRB revisions, calibrating a practicum evaluation) still requires a present human, which is why this lands at 9 rather than in the resistant teens.

Some physical or field component. Teaching happens in a physical room on a fixed schedule with office hours, proctored exams, and hands-on rat/human-subject labs or EEG and eye-tracking demos in some programs, but nothing here is manual work in an uncontrolled setting — the 8 reflects place-bound presence, not physical skill, and the growing share of asynchronous online sections pulls it no higher.

Certification preferred, not legally required. A PhD or master's plus regional accreditation and departmental hiring standards is the whole gate — no state board licenses postsecondary psychology instruction, no one revokes a credential over a bad lecture, and the 5 rather than 0 is earned only by HLC/SACSCOC faculty-qualification rules and, for those supervising clinical practica, APA program accreditation standards that require credentialed supervisors.

The human relationship is the product. The 14 is doing real work: students choose sections by instructor, letters of recommendation for grad school are only worth what your name and specific knowledge of that student are worth, mentorship on an honors thesis is a two-year relationship, and disclosures in office hours about depression or assault go to a person the student has decided to trust — none of that transfers to a shared course shell.

Meaningful discretion. Grade appeals, academic-integrity referrals, deciding whether a student's disclosure triggers a Title IX or care-team report, and judging when an undergraduate protocol crosses into human-subjects risk are consequential calls, but they run through university procedures, appeals committees, and IRB review rather than resting on the instructor alone — hence 10, not the high-teens of someone who owns the final unappealable decision.