Psychology and social work programs, particularly clinical and counseling tracks, typically require an overall band of 4.5 or higher and place real weight on Speaking and Listening — clinical training is fundamentally built around interviewing, active listening, and verbal communication with clients.
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Clinical psychology and social work training centers on conducting assessments, running therapeutic sessions, and communicating with clients and care teams — skills that depend directly on strong spoken comprehension and expression, not just academic reading and writing. Programs with a clinical or field-placement component often reflect this in how they weight your Speaking and Listening scores during review, even when the overall requirement looks similar to other social science fields.
A research-focused psychology track (experimental or quantitative psychology, for instance) generally weights Writing more heavily, similar to other research-based social science fields, while a clinical or counseling track weights Speaking and Listening more heavily given direct client contact. If you're unsure which track a program considers your application under, ask directly, since it can affect how your section scores are actually evaluated.
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