Criminology
UCAS Code: LL33
Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) - BA (Hons)
Entry requirements
A level
Access to HE Diploma
Pass with 45 Level 3 credits including 30 Distinctions and a number of merits/passes in subject specific modules
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
With three Higher Level subjects at 655
Leaving Certificate - Higher Level (Ireland) (first awarded in 2017)
Pearson BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma (first teaching from September 2016)
Scottish Advanced Higher
Scottish Higher
UCAS Tariff
We've calculated how many Ucas points you'll need for this course.
About this course
Explore the nature and social impact of crime and investigate the subject from a critical and sociological perspective. You'll graduate with the skills and experience suitable for a wide range of careers in the policy, legal, criminal justice, academic and civil sectors. You could find a job as a youth worker, counsellor, police or probation officer – or pursue a career in human rights, counter-terrorism or the intelligence services.
**Why study BA Criminology at Goldsmiths?**
- Issues of social inequality and justice are brought to the foreground in this degree. You’ll learn how race, gender, class and nationality connect to crime and control, taking an international perspective to explore differences across the globe.
- You'll be taught by researchers at the cutting edge of criminological and sociological research on urban crime, control and security, and globalisation and crime. And, as part of a tight-knit group of students, you'll benefit from the support and expertise of your teachers throughout your degree.
- Modules such as Criminal Justice in Context give you the opportunity to meet and learn from leaders in criminal justice, policy and campaigning sectors, offering up to date knowledge.
- You’ll have access to a range of work placements and volunteer opportunities and we’ll help you find an organisation that suits you. You might take part in training to support a victim of crime, attend court, or mentor young people.
- You'll learn how to research. Being able to gather and analyse different types of information from a wide variety of sources is a vital skill in the digital age where there is a lot of information but a shortage of truth.
- You'll be taught by experts in the social sciences, as well as those involved with and who have experience of criminal justice.
Modules
This programme will allow you to consider the subject of criminology from a sociological perspective. You will study:
How our knowledge of crime and criminality is refracted through culture and how the media represent crime, law and social order
Explanations for why people commit ‘crime’
How governments respond to ‘crime’, and how they might respond differently
The history and development of criminology as a discipline
Social control, policing, surveillance and security
Crime as a global phenomenon and its policing in the context of global inequality, the movement of peoples, international trade, human rights and state violence
Practical cases and stories from people working in and with experience of the criminal justice system
Research methods for the empirical investigation of sociological and criminological topics
You'll learn to consider the problem of crime from a critical perspective in the context of modern forms of power. You will develop a practical, but conceptually sophisticated, set of skills that will equip you for a range of careers in the sector and beyond.
Year 1 (credit level 4) you will take the following compulsory modules:
Crime, Control and the State
Imaginative Criminology
Modern Knowledge, Modern Power
Researching Society and Culture 1A
Researching Society and Culture 1B
Year 2 (credit level 5) You take these compulsory modules and one option module:
The Making of the Modern World
Explaining Crime
Researching Society and Culture 2
Criminal Justice in Context
Crimes Against Humanity
Year 3 (credit level 6) You take two compulsory modules:
Contemporary Issues in Criminology
Dissertation
You also choose option modules to the value of 60 credits. Modules recently available have included:
Race, Racism and Social Theory
Global Development and Underdevelopment
Sociology of Visuality
Childhood Matters: Society, Theory and Culture
Making Data Matter
Sociologies of Emerging Worlds
Privacy, Surveillance and Security
Philosophy, Politics and Alterity
Subjectivity, Health and Medicine
Prisons, Punishment and Society
Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.
Assessment methods
You’ll be assessed by a variety of methods, depending on your module choices. These include coursework, examinations, group work and projects.
The Uni
Goldsmiths, University of London
Sociology
What students say
We've crunched the numbers to see if overall student satisfaction here is high, medium or low compared to students studying this subject(s) at other universities.
How do students rate their degree experience?
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Sociology
Teaching and learning
Assessment and feedback
Resources and organisation
Student voice
Who studies this subject and how do they get on?
Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)
After graduation
The stats in this section relate to the general subject area/s at this university – not this specific course. We show this where there isn't enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.
Sociology
What are graduates doing after six months?
This is what graduates told us they were doing (and earning), shortly after completing their course. We've crunched the numbers to show you if these immediate prospects are high, medium or low, compared to those studying this subject/s at other universities.
Top job areas of graduates
We have quite a lot of sociology graduates, although numbers fell last year. But graduates still do pretty well. Most sociology graduates go straight into work when they complete their degrees, and a lot of graduates go into jobs in social professions such as recruitment, education, community and youth work, and housing. An important option for a sociology graduate is social work - and we're short of people willing to take this challenging but rewarding career. Sociology is a flexible degree and you can find graduates from the subject in pretty much every reasonable job — obviously, you don't find many doctors or engineers, but you do find them in finance, the media, healthcare, marketing and even IT. Sociology graduates taking further study often branch out into other qualifications, like teaching, law, psychology, HR and even maths, so don’t think a sociology degree restricts you to just one set of options.
What about your long term prospects?
Looking further ahead, below is a rough guide for what graduates went on to earn.
Sociology, social policy and anthropology
The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.
£17k
£22k
£26k
Note: this data only looks at employees (and not those who are self-employed or also studying) and covers a broad sample of graduates and the various paths they've taken, which might not always be a direct result of their degree.
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The Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset combines HRMC earnings data with student records from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
While there are lots of factors at play when it comes to your future earnings, use this as a rough timeline of what graduates in this subject area were earning on average one, three and five years later. Can you see a steady increase in salary, or did grads need some experience under their belt before seeing a nice bump up in their pay packet?
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