Evaluation of student performance in psychotherapy.

In 1970, the APA's Psychotherapy Curriculum and Consultation Committee on Psychotherapy Training recommended that the faculty of training programs should formulate and publish explicit criteria by which the student's practice of psychotherapy can be evaluated. An informal survey of advanced clinical psychology graduate students (N = 17) of an APA-approved program indicated that during their first year of psychotherapy training, 77% of the students either did not know the criteria used to evaluate their performance as psychotherapists or thought that the evaluation was based on the professor's personal biases. The issue of using client outcome vs. competence in explicitly specified therapeutic skills as evaluative criteria was discussed. A combination of both criteria was recommended for implementation in training programs.