i<3YaoMing

Hi everyone,

Its almost class selection time again for incoming frosh at Berk. I've been hearing all these horror stories about "weeder classes" and impacted majors at Berkeley. Can someone list which are such classes/majors? Also how difficult are such courses actually? Would you say that the difficulty is being exaggerated?

Thanks!

Cupola

Practically every engineering major (except for ChemE) is impacted. Aside from Econ, I can't think of any others off the top of my head.

A few technical weeders include Chem 3A (organic chem), Chem 4A (gen chem, quantitative analysis), Physics 7B (thermodynamics, E/M), Math 1B (single variable calc), and more. Out of the ones I've mentioned, I've only taken Chem 4A, but it wasn't too bad. Most weeders I've seen give an A- or better to about a quarter of the class. The main business weeder is UGBA 10. Since the material is so easy, minor mistakes cost you big time, or so I've heard.

bartleby

changusmc

Is Math 54 a weeder class?

kenf1234

No, Math 54 isn't considered a weeder class. People have already been weeded before Math 54, in most cases, I think. That doesn't mean the class is easy or the grade curve is generous. You can search google and see old class sites for Math 54, check out the tests and the grading curves, in many cases...

Chem 1A is actually a huge weeder class for all the wannabe pre-meds.

mrniphty

Chem 4A isn't really a weeder class. They set the average to be B/B+.

Castel

@Cupola: Are all the EECS classes basically weeder classes as well?

Cupola

Castel: The CS 61 series is definitely weeder material. I don't know too much about EECS so I can't tell you much about courses like EE 20N. There are a few upper-division CS classes where your grade largely depends on a small number of really long projects, but by then very few people will be failing. In a nutshell, the grading supposedly gets more lenient once you're out of the lower-division courses.

mrniphty: It seems to depend largely on who teaches the course. In fall 2006, Head-Gordon and Moretto curved the class to a mean GPA of 2.82, with 21% of the class receiving a grade >= A-. I don't know how exactly the distribution looked when I took it in fall 2007 with Kim, Moretto, and Saykally, but it seemed like a lot of people got C's...which is weird because Saykally curves really nicely in Chem 1B.

mrniphty

Strange. When I took it with Cohen, it seemed like everyone got an A or a B. http://www.thecampusbuddy.com/Course...ollege_id=1001 says that the average was 2.94 (I think last fall?) with Head-Gordon so it looks like you're right.

cnat

Difficulty is somewhat exaggerated. It does NOT differentiate the super smart from the not so super smart. It more so differentiates the somewhat disciplined people from the non-disciplined people.

Azure326

I agree with cnat. As far as CS 61A is concerned, I definitely don't think it's a weeder class anymore (there's not even a curve or anything and midterms are relatively straight-forward). I have heard that EE20 is a different story though...