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Are EECS students competitive to the point where they won't help each other? Are study groups prevalent?
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I've heard some hidious things from MCB majors (Molecular and Cellular Biology/Pre-Med; not relevant EECS necessarily, but still competitive as such). It's basically this: if you need study notes, ASK FROM MORE THAN ONE PERSON, and be careful about study groups. Because the competition can becomes outrageously stifling, people will go to lengths such as creating "fake" (ie. factually incorrect) study sheets to give to other students to lower their grades and throw them off the curve, and even create "fake" study groups, to knock off even more students and help the perpetrators further. If you ever need any help in a competitive major such as MCB (not EECS as much, because the difficulty of the EECS material matters more than the curve), ASK A PROFESSOR/GSI in office hours for the best responses. In EECS, you're pretty much on your own, because the material is so difficult that a curve is secondary to course difficulty.
As for Physics 7A, the material is not too terrible, but the curve is pretty ridiculous (I've seen test results where students will score in the high 90s on midterms, because they have studied to extreme lengths to throttle the curve). An average grade is a B- in the class, but the curve is made so that it's actually impossible to fail outright unless you are at a total loss for the class material. Curved classes I'm aware of where failure is routine are weeders such a Math 1B, Chem 1A, etc. Chemical Engineering is insane - 50+ percent of students will get failing grades, AND NO CURVE IS IN PLACE FOR INFLATION!