In response to the many debates on ugrad quality

[sakky]

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But that screws over all of the Berkeley students. While the Stanford students get cushy rides in grade-inflated classes, Berkeley kids have to kick and scream for four years. And don’t say that will come back to bite Stanford in the ass, b/c I don’t think a lot of Stanford grads are hurting for job placement/grad school placement. In the US at least (debateable for International) Stanford is generally seen as a better school than Berkeley. Now, that doesn’t mean that it IS, but I don’t think it’s fair for Berkeley students to work so much harder than Stanford student when they aren’t even getting the same recognition.

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<p>But what about MIT/Caltech students? I think we can all agree that MIT and Caltech are extremely rigorous - in fact, far more so than Stanford and even Berkeley. But that doesn’t seem to have ‘screwed over’ MIT/Caltech grads. Look at the job placement of MIT and Caltech graduates.</p>

<p>Again, let me give you an example. I know a guy who got a 2.9/4 GPA in physics at MIT, and still got admitted to many of the best Physics PhD programs in the country, including MIT itself. I know a number of other MIT engineers with quite poor grades who nevertheless got primo job offers from some of the best employers in the country. That’s because MIT, while tough, has also developed a fierce reputation that is highly respected by PhD programs and by employers. Many employers are happy to take an MIT grad even with bad grades, because they know that those guys basically went through hell. </p>

<p>The other aspect is that MIT’s own graduate schools have great respect for its undergrad program, to the point that MIT grad school sweeps up many of its own undergrads. MIT undergrads are far far more likely to go to grad school at MIT than grad school anywhere else, by a factor of almost 8 compared to the next most popular grad school choice (Harvard). </p>

<p>So why can’t Berkeley do that? The truth is, Berkeley’s grad programs don’t seem to have much respect for their own undergrads, as evidenced by the fact that so few Berkeley undergrads (on a per-capita basis) actually get into Berkeley PhD programs. Or, as you can see from the law school stats, Berkeley undergrads have difficulty getting into Boalt, compared to applicants from peer schools. For example, the admitted Berkeley undergrads to Boalt actually have HIGHER grades than the Stanford undergrads it admits.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/uac/preprof/05prelawstats.pdf[/url]”>http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/uac/preprof/05prelawstats.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/Law/lawStats.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/Law/lawStats.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>My point is this. If you want to compete against HYPSM, then you have 2 models to follow. You can either be like Stanford (and to a lesser extent HYP) , and invoke institutional grade inflation. Or, you can do what MIT has done and make yourself extremely rigorous, but then communicate to the world how rigorous your programs are. But you can’t just stay in the middle, which is where Berkeley is now, with some rigorous programs, but other programs which are, quite frankly, jokes.</p>