jin2daj

I hear that getting grades at public schools, specifically the UC system is really difficult (high dropout rate). Also, unlike private schools, there is little grade inflation.

I have plans to attend graduate school, how hard do you think/know getting grades at UCs (specifically at UCLA where I'm going next year) will be?

CalBear2009

jin2daj, I think that that information about the dropout rate might be for freshman and not transfers (at least I think that I've read something along those lines in the past). I haven't seen any grade inflation in the college of letters & sciences here at Cal (no extra credit to boost lagging scores). But I wouldn't say that making good grades is past anyone who makes it in to the UC system (personal opinion). It takes a bit more dedication to coursework but it is definitely doable. Anyone from UCLA have any insight?

impressincharges

Well I just finished my junior year at UC Berkeley. Some teachers curve differently than others. In one of my classes over half the class got an A. On the other hand I studied my ass off in my biochem class, got high scores on the tests, and still ended up with an A-. Some classes are fairly easy but you can still not get an A because of the curve- if you make a tiny mistake then you're already knocked down to an A-. However if you care a lot about your GPA you can check out the grade distributions at pickaprof.com before you enroll in a class.

Malishka31

UCLA

It will depend on your major. For the life science majors there is a lot of weeder courses with curves that can screw you over, but once you are in your upper division courses i would say that getting a B- is pretty much easy with some effort on your part, getting an A requires work.

I am not an LS major, my major was in the social sciences and it was interdepartmental, so i have taken courses in PoliSci, Econ, History, IDS, Euro Studies, and some others... i am not by any means an overachiver, i worked a lot and am pretty much in the adult student category while i was at UCLA, i did not study everyday and i crammed the night b4-------- the lowest grade i have is a B.

One time i didnt even take the final and got a B.

So getting a B is not hard, my gpa was right around the 3.5 mark and that was good for me considering the effort i put in.

Getting the A is HARD- most of the classes are somewhat curved and in most cases the As are rare. IN some courses you do have a lot of assignment, like in high school for example, and everything has assigned point values and in those courses there is usually more As. But most course grades consist of midterm(s) + final and usually there are more B range grades than anything else.

This has been just my experience, your mileage may vary.

luvtoolearn

I would have to agree w/ Malishka for the grading system at Berkeley as well.
its not too difficult getting all Bs, but for some reason its very difficult getting over that A boarder line. Some of it has to do w/ the way GSIs grade. It is hard work getting all As. Maintaining a B average is not too bad, Maintaining all As...good luck =) I'm in the L&S department btw for any of you who have a major in that department.

Malishka31

Also getting C,D,F is really hard..... for a lot of my courses once the final grades are in there is usually a graph that shows you how the class did, in most cases out of 200 or so students you literally see a handful of A+ (if any at all) then some As, and then a good amount of A-s. Then comes the bulk of the grades in the B- to B+ range, and i think maybe at most you will 15 or so students that fall into the C,D,F category , and out of those 15 i am pretty sure there is going to be less than 3 that actually get a D or F.

One time i dropped a class at UCLA b/c i was not there when the teacher handed back the midterms, so when i recieved it and saw i got a 32/50 - i decided to drop- well, low and behold i asked someone in class and it turns out that a 32 was a B!!!!!!!!!!!! This was for geography- i felt like such a dumb butt afterwards b/c i had already dropped.