Does grade deflation really exist at Berkeley?

[sakky]

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Sakky, I don’t want to really list out all the classes, but in BioE more than half of the upper-div classes are cross-registered for graduate level classes so I’ve had to put out journal spec publications.In fact, one such final project was published in a top journal. This may be different in EECS where I do concede it is more exam based, however, my microfab. class had a final paper writeup, IEEE form

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<p>Actually, it then seems as if BioE is a clear anomaly, and indeed is a clear and recent anomaly. {I know a number of former Berkeley BioE graduates, and none of them had to write a single paper of journal-quality as part of their coursework.} But that’s why I invite any other engineers - current and past - to report how many upper-division courses of their required writing publication-style papers, and I am confident that the percentage is going to be small. </p>

<p>But in any case, what cannot be disputed is that EECS has significantly more students than BioE does, which means that the curricula formats of the EECS major must be weighted more heavily than is BioE in terms of capturing an overall view of Berkeley engineering coursework actually undertaken by the students. </p>

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Either way its somewhat of representative of both research fields–EECS is slightly more analytical/quantitative which explains the exams while BioE is slightly more experimental. In a sense, a BioE, can get by with diligence and less aptitude because you can look up PubMed for reference material, say the mechanism of anaerobic metabolism in <insert organism=“”>, or the success rate of gene therapy in african males aged 18-30, or whatever. In EECS, looking at many of the technical papers is not going to help much, unless you really understand the math/physics side of it. If you walk into a research facility for both fields here is what you’ll see:</insert></p>

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<p>Actually, the differences between the two career tracks is far more fundamental. BioE, whether we like it or not, is mostly a research-oriented career. It is for this reason that, let’s face it, you basically need a PhD or at least an MS, for the BioE BS degree is not particularly marketable, being usually the lowest paying of all engineering disciplines. {Granted, Civil Engineering had an unusually penurious year in 2010, but in most years, even the CivilE’s garner higher pay than do the BioE’s). </p>

<p>In stark contrast, EECS and most other engineering disciplines provide a well-established career pathway right out of undergrad. Most EECS students - even at a research-oriented university such as Berkeley - are not interested in research and never need to be. The EECS industry has a plethora of slots available to those with just BS degrees with which to add value without ever once having to engage in the research process. Of the numerous EECS BS graduates that I know that never proceeded to graduate school, only a tiny handful have ever once read an academic research paper, or would even want to do so. They do not work in research settings, and never intend to.</p>

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To deny that implies you don’t have too much experience in research.

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<p>Um, I am confident that my familiarity with the research process is fairly strong. </p>

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Now, with regards to our lab tech. A lab tech getting 2 first author publications in 3 years is actually doing a very good job, especially if they are in amazing journals.

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<p>Let’s be clear about what I said. The (implicit) question is not whether he is doing a fine job on an absolute basis. The question is whether he is doing well enough to be admitted to a top engineering graduate program, for which the level of competition is high. I would say that if you wanted to be competitive for admissions to a top program, you probably need to have more than 2 A-level pubs after 3 years of full-time lab work. </p>

<p>After all, like it or not, the world of academia judges people not just on their total research output, but also crucially on the time (or at least the perceived time) they had to produce that output. Like I said, a newly minted PhD with 10 A-level pubs would be a top tenure-track job market candidate, but an associate professor undergoing tenure-review with 10 A-level pubs would be judged to be subpar at most top departments, and indeed, would probably be dismissed so that the department could make an offer to that aforementioned new PhD. As iniquitous as such a system may seem, that is how it works. Similarly, a 3-year lab tech with 2 A-level pubs may well be judged as being worse than a new college graduate with no pubs, under the notion that the latter might have more than 2 pubs if he were to work for 3 years as a lab tech. In other words, academia judges people not only by their absolute research output but also for their option value. </p>

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So by that logic, our labtech should have been admitted elsewhere besides his backdoor institution, Berkeley. For comparison, he got rejected from very low-tier programs.

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<p>Well, in his case, I frankly find it hard to feel sorry for him. Oh well, so he had to “settle” for graduate school at Berkeley - something for which the overwhelming majority of engineering grad school applicants around the world would gladly take. </p>

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And lets not forget those departments like Berkeley ChemE that don’t even allow their own undergrads in the program

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<p>For all of my tussles with the ChemE program, I must admit that the situation is hardly as tragic as you make it out to be. Plenty of Berkeley ChemE’s are indeed admitted right back into Berkeley for graduate school…in Material Science, which is such a closely related cousin of ChemE to the point that it’s exceedingly difficult to delineate a hard boundary between the two disciplines. I also cannot deny that the Berkeley undergrad ChemE program has built a rather productive pipeline of graduates - including a number who I never thought to be strong performers - to a certain ChemE grad program in Palo Alto. </p>

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From my completely anecdotal evidence of the undergrads who I have done research with over 4 years, I would say that 20% got a publication. This is including students who are kind of just doing the motions in lab, not even expecting a publication, but doing it to get letters of reference. If you want a publication as an undergrad, you can get one, but it will take about 1-2 years for manuscript submission.

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<p>The question is not whether they can obtain some pub - I readily agree that it’s fairly trivial to obtain ‘mid-listing’ on a laundry list of authors for some C-level, or perhaps even B-level pub. But such work conveys little value as the coin of the academic realm. What you really want are A-level pubs, and with prominent authorship credit - ideally first-author-listing. That is something that I highly doubt that 20% of Berkeley engineering undergrads engaged in research can obtain. {Heck, the true value is probably closer to 2% than to 20%.}</p>