Martin Strobel: teaching

FAQ to Minor Human and Legal Decision Making

Current State of the Minor

Dear interested students,

unfortunately FPN has cancelled their contribution to the minor. They do not have the capacity to offer course PSY3375 to students from outside their faculty. The remaining three courses do not have enough ECTS to qualify as a minor (UM regulations). This implies that the minor "Human and Legal Decision Making" cannot be offered in the academic year 2025/2026. I am working on bringing it back with a renewed program, but I will not manage to do this in time for a seemless transition (my bad, I am sorry for this).

You may still apply for the other three courses in the program. However, since you will not receive the label of the minor anymore, please ensure that taking individual courses is compatible with your study curriculum. Alternatively, if admitted, you may also follow individual courses extracurricularly.

In case you have comments on the old programme or ideas about how a renewed program should look like, do not hesitate to send me an email. Please add "HLDM minor" in the subject line.

Outdated

August 9th, 2024
Some students appealed. We are currently dealing with these cases.
July 31st, 2024
We receive many emails with questions/complaints that students were rejected to follow PSY3375 and therefore cannot follow the entire minor. Unfortunately, at the moment (for the coming academic year 2024/2025) we cannot do anything about it. There is simply not enough teaching capacity for additional groups. We are working to solve (or at least to mitigate) the problem for the academic year 2025/2026. It is yet unclear how such a solution will look like. More will be known by the beginning of 2025.

Old questions

Is there anything I have to know for the registration?
When registering for the courses of the minor via SCA, please mention in the comment/motivation that you want to enroll in the minor. By this we can differentiate you from those students who want to take PSY3375 as an individual course.
The minor has 25 ECTS. I am wondering which additional modules I can undertake to fulfill the remaining 5 ECTs to get up to 30 ECTS.
The minor has only 25 ECTS. So there is no need to get to 30 ECTS. Of course you have to get to the required total amount of credits for your bachelor. For this you have to choose sufficiently many modules from your "home" programme.
Do the modules have to be completed in period 3 or can they be taken during periods 1 or 2, given that the minor is only offered during periods 1 and 2?
After period 2 you are done with the minor as long as you do not have a resit for one of the modules. For the scheduling of the resits please see the academic calendars of the corresponding faculty.
Are there additional resources available where I could gather more information about this minor, as the details provided in the document appear to be rather concise.
For more information you may check out the specific course descriptions (unfortunately, the course finder given in the description of the minor does not work anymore). Further you may contact the course coordinators, but bear in mind that due to their workload they might not be able to answer individual questions.
- Neuropsychology and Law↗ (this will only show an overview, you have to search for PSY3375 among the elective courses)
- Crisis Management in Organisations↗
- Economic Psychology↗
- Law and Neuroscience↗ (this will only show an overview, you have to search for LAW3021 among the elective courses)
Note that I cannot guarantee stability of these links. A special feature of Maastricht University's website is that once things work, they are changed. I assume that this is done to keep us sharp and flexible. If the information on the website were stable, what would be the challenge? I can guarantee that the links once worked, but not more. Or in a completely different and more blunt wording: The UM website sucks.
How many students are allowed to enroll in this minor?
Theoretically there is no limit. But FPN puts an upper limit of 56 to the number of students for their course. The 56 includes students of psychology who are not interested in the minor but just want to do this psychology course.
I have read that for the courses EBC2103 and LAW3021, there are prerequisites: prior knowledge of microeconomics/probability theory and mathematics; basic knowledge of law. However, I have not covered any of these topics in my bachelor. Will this lead to a higher workload for these courses?
If you miss some prerequisites then, of course, you have to work a bit more to cover them. For the math part in Economic Psychology, ordinary school math should be sufficient. Most of you had probability theory in high school. That will do. For the law part I do not know, but the course coordinators are very well aware that students from other faculties participate. And so far I did not get any serious complaints. If you want to do something interdisciplinary you sometimes have to leave your comfort zone.
Is there an overview of the average study hours dedicated to these courses? In other words, how many contact hours are there for these courses?
I do not have more information than in the course descriptions. If you do not find this information in there, then please contact the course coordinator, but bear in mind that they might not be able to answer due to workload.
My IB major is Organisation, and last semester I took Crisis Management in Organisations as a core course for my major. My question is as follows, if I applied to the Human and Legal Decision Making minor, could I replace this course for another, of course related to the minor? Since I have already passed the course, I believe retaking it would not be the right thing to do, right?
You will not be able to receive ECTS for doing the same course a second time. So it would be good to search for a substitute. For the minor we do not have alternative courses (actually I wanted to give students more choice, but I was not allowed to do this). If I am correct then there are four core courses for the major, but you need only two of them. So my suggestion is to do another course for the major and account the crises course for the minor. The courses for the minor do not have to be done in the same year.
I have a health condition called ME/CFS, better-known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I can take part in tutorials and attend lectures, but sit-in exams are quite challenging for me as I cannot function too long without taking a break. Therefore I would like to know before choosing this minor if there will be any MECC exams and if there are, how long they normally take.
I am afraid, I cannot give you a straight answer to this. Further up you find links to the descriptions of the courses. These descriptions should contain some information about the examination method. For more precise information you have to contact the course coordinators.
However, if your CFS is diagnosed, then usually you can ask the study advisors for a special treatment (for example including breaks in the exams). I would start with asking the study advisors of your own faculty but you might have to contact the study advisors of the course offering faculty too.
I'm currently doing a minor in Human and Legal Decision-Making. I was wondering if we will get an overview of this semester to know if we'll get a break/reflection week between periods.
There is no overview. But you can find out yourself. All you need are the Academic Calendars from the providing faculties. At the moment these are SBE (School of Business and Economics), FPN (Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience) and LAW (aka FOL, Faculty of Law). You should get to the information when googling with the search terms: Maastricht University Academic Calendar [name or abbreviation of the faculty].

General information about minors

https://curriculum.maastrichtuniversity.nl/education/bachelors/minors