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<p>Even if I did, the benefits would be so marginal as to be basically negligible. After all, the real competition for grad school spots is not the intra-Berkeley competition, but rather the competition against students from other schools, particularly those (like a certain one in Palo Alto) that are infamous for relaxed grading standards. </p>
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<p>To be clear, I don’t think the problem is with the high end of the grading scale. A top GPA is hard to get anywhere, even in Palo Alto. </p>
<p>The issue is with the lower end of the scale. Those other schools truncate their grading schemes such that it is practically impossible to get a truly terrible GPA. Even the students among the bottom of their class will have a GPA that, while middling, will still allow them to pass their classes and graduate. On the other hand, some Berkeley students will indeed end up with truly terrible GPA’s. For example, I knew one guy whose GPA was literally 0.5. That is, his grades were half D’s, half F’s. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I think the most salient issue is not so much with overall grade inflation between particular schools, but the relative grade inflation of certain majors of those schools. For example, it is a well-established fact that has been discussed here on this thread that engineering and the natural science majors are simply graded harder than are the humanities and social science majors, for reasons that I have never found to be logical. Why should certain students in certain majors be able to get higher grades for less work than do students in other majors? I could understand perhaps if this might happen in certain years due to simple randomness. But the problem is systemic. For example, Berkeley students may find Chemical Engineering to be too hard and switch to majoring in American Studies. But you never hear of an American Studies student complaining that the major is too hard and switching over to Chemical Engineering. </p>
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<p>In fairness to Berkeley, I think it should also be said that I doubt that Berkeley’s grading is harder than that of the bulk of other schools. If we could somehow measure the grading standards of all 2700 colleges in the United States, weighted by student population, I suspect that Berkeley would fall somewhere in the middle. In fact, the average Berkeley GPA is about a 3.25, which is roughly around the national average. </p>
<p><a href=“https://osr2.berkeley.edu/Public/STUDENT.DATA/PUBLICATIONS/FACT.SHEET/factsheet.pdf[/url]”>https://osr2.berkeley.edu/Public/STUDENT.DATA/PUBLICATIONS/FACT.SHEET/factsheet.pdf</a></p>
<p>But I don’t think that’s the right comparison to draw. After all, Berkeley isn’t just an average school. Berkeley is supposed to be one of the very best schools, and the students are supposed to be among the best in the country. Hence, I think it is entirely proper to compare Berkeley against the Ivies, Stanford, and other top private schools such as Duke and Northwestern. To that, I would say that Berkeley’s grading scheme is one of the harder ones, and certainly a “truncated-ly” harder one. That is, somebody who flunked out of Berkeley could have probably passed, if barely, if he had gone to one of those other schools. </p>
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<p>I think you hit upon the heart of the issue. While grading is generally determined by prof, profs at Berkeley have little hesitation to hand out bad grades, compared to profs at those other schools. That may be due to social factors and tipping points: if you’re the only prof at Stanford who actually grades hard, you will clearly stick out from the rest of the faculty, but if you’re a tough grader at Berkeley, you will not be conspicuous because the Berkeley faculty has many tough graders. </p>
<p>However, certain courses at Berkeley institute tough grading as a result of direct departmental policy, regardless of what the individual prof may want to do. For example, the Berkeley EECS department specifically states that average course grading is not to exceed 2.7-2.9. The outcome of this policy is, of course, to gravely damage the prospects of the bulk of those students when they compete for grad school spots and jobs against EE/CS students from Stanford. </p>
<p>[Grading</a> Guidelines for Undergraduate Courses | EECS at UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml]Grading”>http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Policies/ugrad.grading.shtml)</p>