Grading Scale at Berkeley

[sakky]

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You oversimplify the situation by assuming that the difficulty of the engineering curriculum implies that CoE students can thrive in other departments or universities. While some engineering students are well-rounded, you’d be surprised to see the number of engineers, raised in English-speaking countries, who can crunch numbers like crazy but can’t manage to write a coherent paragraph. I know for a fact that Stanford and Harvard’s undergraduate requirements include more humanities courses than Berkeley’s, and this would be a disadvantage to them.

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<p>I actually don’t think there is a significant difference between the non-foreign-language breadth requirements for engineering students at Berkeley vs. those at Stanford or Harvard, when corrected for differences in the academic calendar. Berkeley requires 6 breadth semester courses, whereas Stanford requires 10 trimester courses, which is basically the same after correcting for the differences in semesters and trimesters. </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/students/current-undergraduates/advising/hssreq.pdf/[/url]”>http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/students/current-undergraduates/advising/hssreq.pdf/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>[Office</a> of the University Registrar](<a href=“http://registrar.stanford.edu/students/courses/GER.htm]Office”>http://registrar.stanford.edu/students/courses/GER.htm)</p>

<p>Harvard, I agree, does require more courses, or will starting with the revamped Core Curriculum. But the requirements are almost certainly easier than the breadth requirements of the Berkeley CoE, which mandate that 2 of the 6 requirements actually be upper-division courses. </p>

<p>Where I would agree is that Stanford and Harvard have extensive foreign language requirements that the Berkeley CoE does not have. However, if somebody is not a native English speaker, then by definition, he speaks another language fluently, in which case he would have been able to easily fill those language requirements by simply taking courses or taking the appropriate departmental waiver placement tests in his home language. </p>

<p>Heck, I remember Berkeley students who were fluent in their home language but sneakily decided to take the intro courses in that language anyway, just to get a string of easy A’s (and screwing over all the students in those courses who were actually trying to learn the language). They didn’t learn anything new, but hey, they got their A’s and that’s all that mattered to them. I believe Berkeley tried to clamp down on this game by assessing whether students trying to take those intro courses weren’t already fluent in the language and just trying to cynically pad their GPA’s. However, a simpler way to solve this problem would have been to simply grade all of those basic language courses on a P/NP basis, thereby removing the incentive for people to camp out and hunt for easy A’s.</p>