The SPS Tripos has been renamed PPS.

The Faculty of Social and Political Sciences is to become the Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies on the 1st January 2009. The undergraduate degree taught by the Faculty has changed from SPS to PPS (Politics, Psychology and Sociology).

According to faculty spokesman Dr Glen Rangwala, “The old name of the Tripos left the field of Psychology mostly invisible to potential applicants. One of the faculty’s constituent components is a thriving department in social and developmental psychology...the change of name increases our ability to attract students to Cambridge with this interest.”

Other tutors are reported to have said that the course name is to avoid the misrepresentation of offering a social sciences degree without any course study in economics.

Student response to the name change has been mixed. James Taggart, a PPS student at Trinity Hall, claims that “it’s a bit trivial – many are seeing it as a ploy to sound more like PPE at Oxford, but the takeup of psychology in second year really is tragically low. It’s a good idea in theory, but I’m not sure it’s going to make much difference in practise.”

Other proposals involve introducing greater choice in Part I of the Tripos, and include making available options in economics, education, anthropology and computer science. Critics of this proposal have argued that unpopular papers from other courses are simply being dumped onto the new PPS course without any real justification. One 2nd-year PPS student says “I resent the fact that the faculty is now offering random papers for no reason: British Economic History and Introduction to Computing don’t really have anything to do with the SPS course I applied for.”

Martin McQuade