<p>The people who were REALLY dissatisfied probably dropped out or transferred out, and therefore may not have even been around for the survey. </p>
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<p>So it’s just EECS? It’s not any of the other engineering majors? I know a guy who got a 3.4 and tried to get into ME, and couldn’t get in. Do you think he’s happy? Or what about Econ? What about all of the other impacted majors? </p>
<p>I also never said that this was the ONLY reason why people choose Stanford over Berkeley. But it is a reason, and a pretty good one at that. You fix this one, then we can move onto some of the other problems. This is all about trying to make Berkeley a better school. I am becoming increasingly convinced that many people just don’t want Berkeley to become a better school. Hence, all of the resistance to my ideas. You don’t even want to try to solve the problem of impaction. At least somebody like greatesteyn admits that she has ulterior motives as to why she doesn’t want impaction solved.</p>
<p>Hehe, here I am thinking sakky doesn’t have a sense of humor, but this entire paragraph was pretty amusing.</p>
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<p>One possibility that comes to my mind is that maybe MCB can only accomodate around 580 students, and it has 580 students, so it’s not impacted. Economics, on the other hand, can only accomodate around 320 students while the demand is maybe, 400 students. Now, Berkeley can either take resources away from MCB and give it to econ, making MCB impacted and Econ non-impacted, or leave things alone. And in this case Berkeley chose to leave things alone.</p>
<p>Now, what I do agree we can do is simply take resources away from some majors that have low demand or have unused resources or something.</p>
<p>sakky, do you still stand by what you say that ten years ago the only impacted major in L&S was CS? I haven’t seen you talk about it lately and I would actually like to see some proof of this though it’s probably hard to come by. This is the biggest thing that’s bugging me about impaction because you can’t really say that Berkeley doesn’t have enough resources to make every major non-impacted, and apparently the problem has been getting worse.</p>
<p>No, no, no. That’s not what I said. I said I liked it. I then gave a reason for why students in general like it. But that’s not my reason and it was never stated that it was my reason. </p>
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<p>I have never said that the reason some majors are impacted is because of lack of resources or faculty or anything like that. I said it was because thats the decision certain departments have made. </p>
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<p>No, I do. But I think that the department heads probably have their reasons and I agree with those reasons, whetever they are. </p>
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<p>Sometimes. </p>
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<p>I like to help. But I don’t think impacted majors are a sufficiently worthy cause because it is not general enough-not even at Berkeley itself.</p>
<p>Do you have a better cause in mind? Maybe you can bring up something that affects a larger part of the student population and we can talk about how to fix it. I’m always up for talking about how to improve Berkeley!</p>
<p>Sakky, I dont think impacted majors are a significant, if any at all, factor at all in someones college choice. I didnt coniderit…Hell, i didnt even know about impaction. Neither did any of my 12 friends who are going to Berkeley from my HS. </p>
<p>By the Way, even comparing poverty and major impaction is ridiculous.</p>
<p>You know the answer to that. I’ll only tell you because you asked: because we have more faculty in some areas than others. Some fields get more money. Why does Haas get a really nice building while Cory is held together with duct tape? Haas gets extra money. You take one side of the equation without balancing the other. I mean, I could naively say that every major at Berkeley must be impacted because we have 22,000 students, while every major at MIT must not be because they have 6,000 students. What about the number of faculty and the resources of each school (or department)?</p>
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<p>For a good student, Berkeley is a roughly equal choice. I won’t say strictly better or worse, because like I always say I don’t deal in those terms. I will say that Berkeley won’t be a significantly better or worse choice than a private school in terms of the quality of education received.</p>
<p>For a bad student, a private school may be a better choice because they cannot qualify for their desired major at Berkeley. That’s not to say they’ll get a better education necessarily (or that it will matter, because they’re not good students to begin with), but that they may prefer a private school (and again, this preference would not have a correlation to quality of eduation).</p>
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<p>Completely irrelevant. Why even mention this? You asked whether people seriously preferred impacted majors, and I said yes (and so did greatestyen). Your question may have been rhetorical, but its answer may still surprise you. Go ask some students. One of my roommates and his project partner (for a summer CS course) both said they preferred impacted majors when I asked them today. No coercion, just a straight “Do you prefer having impacted majors or not?”</p>
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<p>Yes, because we all know that MCB professors and Poli-Sci professors can teach EECS courses. First of all, resources ARE optimized. They’re the two largest majors on campus, therefore they need the resources. If we were to transfer those resources to EECS, that wouldn’t suddenly make Poli-Sci and MCB the not largest majors on campus. That would make them the largest majors on campus with fewer resources. Which would be bad. It would be great if we had a net increase in resources overall, but seeing as how money doesn’t grow on trees, we have a pretty good balance of resources. There isn’t a huge contingency of people that can’t get what they want. Most people are happy with things the way they are.</p>
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<p>You’ve answered your own question. Which would be a smarter solution: overestimate the resources needed for MCB, so 580 students could get what they need in that major? Or underestimate those needs and shift them over to Mass Comm, where 140 people could make use of them? Yes, we theoretically could strike the ideal balance, but being realistic, I’d much rather the budget people overestimate resources for MCB, which more people want to major in, than overestimate for Mass Comm, which they aren’t expecting many to major in in the first place. It’s the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective.</p>
<p>Furthermore, you imply that it is somehow easy to hire quality professors. While I can’t speak on the quality of professors in MCB and/or Mass Comm, I presume Cal follows standard practices of getting high quality professors. It’s not exactly an easy thing to say, fire two MCB professors and hire two Mass Comm ones to fix a disparity. That’s just now how the system works (otherwise no one would become a professor, since there would be no job security).</p>
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<p>We’re resisting your ideas because they’re faulty. If you could make a clear, convincing argument in which I couldn’t find significant faults, I’d be behind you 100%. There’s a lot of things Berkeley could improve on, I’ll be the first to admit it. I’d love to see Cory remodeled (or at least cleaned once in a decade), I’d like professor rating systems like are provided in EECS for all departments, and I’d like to see those ratings play a moderate role in the salaries of teachers (or some other incentive to get them to increase those ratings).</p>
<p>Some things I just don’t see improving Berkeley education significantly. For example, my own desire to see Cory remodeled would do almost nothing for educational quality–as long as we have chairs and blackboards, we’ll be fine. I do believe a quality professor rating system for each department would significantly improve the quality of education (discovering the EECS one tends to significantly improve the quality of eduaction of EECS majors, I find–we tend to specifically choose good profs and reap the rewards of that).</p>
<p>See, consider this rating system. Name a reasonable counter-argument to it. It has been proven effective, as shown by the EECS department. The cost to run it is minimal–a bunch of scantrons and a couple of hours of scanning is all. Certainly the benefits would outweigh the costs in the minds of a vast majority of the students (find one that wouldn’t want such a feature). Now this is a point I truly believe there is no serious debate about, unlike impacted majors. Bring up arguments like this and we can talk about improving Berkeley. Your arguments will help us steal students from Stanford (and other privates), which to me doesn’t significantly improve a student’s education at Berkeley.</p>
<p>Cory, Evans Hall, Wurster and other similar buildings were constructed by “brutalists” so their structure looks terrible. At that time there was a significant increase in student enrollment and they had to quickly make buildings to accomodate those students (labs, rooms for discussions, etc).</p>
<p>I heard Evans hall will be demolished within the next decade…</p>
<p>Cory isn’t brutalist, it’s too recent and has that bathroom tile exterior as opposed to the requisite “brutalist” concrete. Evans is nto great-looking, but it is nice because unlike many other buildings on campus, it has a large amount of great views, unlike say Davis (building on top of Bechtel Library).</p>
<p>Sakky, you can’t discredit my figure based on dropouts and transfers, as you know, 86.6% of Cal students don’t drop out, and most of those who do drop out do so for other reasons (financial, academic failure.) The dropout rate due to choice of majors can’t be greater than 5-7%, which means that well over 3/4 of students who start at Cal are satisfied with their majors, and over 80% of those who finish at Cal are satisfied with their majors.</p>
<p>Yes, ALL of us want to improve Berkeley, but it’s quite clear that your leitmotiv, the choice of major is blown out of proportion in terms of its importance and effect on the quality of the UG education at Cal. Anyway, this is all off-topic -another thread hijacked-.</p>
<p>My “source” is the accumulated knowledge in my brain. Apparently, some of said knowledge, notably the date of the construction of Wurster, was wrong. It has now been corrected. </p>
<p>I do not consider Cory, Davis, or any of the Units to be true examples of brutalist style. Since that is so, their building dates are irrelevant to my unsuccessful conclusion.</p>
<p>It’s assumed that you have a brain. Where you accumulated this knowledge that “it wasn’t represented a movement in Berkeley until the 70s” is what I am asking.</p>
<p>I meant Soda Hall, not Cory, but greatest is correct to say that Cory is definitely not a brutalist design either, unlike Wurster or Evans, even in the original version (it was expanded in the late 80s with the arched rim.) Even Davis Hall is not exactly brutalist, due to its classic tiled roof.</p>