<p>“he problem seems to be that Berkeley doesn’t seem to be really interested in helping its students get better jobs or better grad-school placements.”</p>
<p>I’m sure this is what is meant, but I think this refers to those not at the top of Berkeley. I mean, I know at least one senior in the math department last year who graduated as clearly the top guy in his math class, and Berkeley was actually nicer to him than it needs to be in some senses. Apparently he was <em>promised</em> admission to Berkeley’s math grad program and could come there if he didn’t get into another top school. That’s cushioning for you! If I had that kind of cushioning in 2 years, I’d not worry a bit about applying to grad school. Of course, he was exceptional, and was accepted at many top schools like MIT and Princeton. But of course, this is a top student. Not many of those can be around! The average student <em>in the COE</em> can be disadvantaged, even if he/she is overall a great student even compared to most of Berkeley’s students as a whole.</p>
<p>Typical of you Sakky, make bold suppositions to “prove” your point.</p>
<p>In this case, the actual number is much higher than zero. Several I have known for years, since long before they won the Rhodes. Several more I’ve gotten to know since their win.</p>
<p>But heck, Sakky, you could care less about actual knowledge. To you, it is the “argument” that counts, or to use your words “logical reasoning and debating skills”. Unfortunately, life outside academe (and even a good part of the academic world) is not about logical reasoning and debating skills. It is about knowledge, experience and the ability to understand what goes on (each of which is far from “logical reasoning and debating skills”). I’ll stick to these and let you handle the logical reasoning and debating skills.</p>
<p>BTW, an example of how experience hurts you is shown in your link in post 150. Maybe some day you’ll learn that it is risky (most of us adults would say foolish) to draw bold conclusions from a survey with a 28% response rate. But I am digressing. Debating is your thing, not mine.</p>
<p>Somehow I think that you’re lying. But in any case, I am quite certain that your Rhodes colleagues, should they exist, would all agree that high grades are highly important in terms of winning the Rhodes, and that it is more difficult to get high grades in certain majors and certain schools than it is in others, which has been my point all along. If you do indeed know more than zero, then surely you should be able to verify this fact with them. </p>
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<p>Considering that my experience and knowledge and ability to understand what is going on seems to greatly surpass yours, I don’t know why you choose to bring up this point. For example, you still haven’t dealt with any of the other points over which we have clashed on other threads. </p>
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<p>And exactly where’s your data? I am not claiming that my data is perfect. But it is certainly far far better than what data you have, which is none at all. I would argue that disputing somebody who is actually presenting data - however incomplete - when you have no data at all, now THAT is truly risky and foolish. </p>
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<p>It’s not your thing? So then why do you keep trying? Why do you keep coming back to take me on? What seems to be ‘your thing’ is debating…and losing.</p>
<p>Look, pal, if you really don’t want to debate, then just don’t do it. Nobody has a gun to your head. Heck, if I were you, and I kept losing over and over again, I would have stopped a long time ago. But some people just seem to be gluttons for punishment.</p>
<p>I’m taking this directly off of my physics 7A professor’s intro lecture notes posted on bspace:</p>
<p>“University guideline specifies that in lower division courses, the total percentage of students getting A and B should not exceed 65%. The good news is that up to 65% of the class will be getting As and Bs. The bad news is that 35% or more of the class will be getting Cs or worse. Make sure you work hard enough to stay ahead of at least 35% of your classmates!”</p>
<p>I’m not sure what to say or believe…Is this really a university guideline or perhaps a physics department guideline or a course specific guideline?</p>
<p>Well, whatever it is…Physics professors who teach future engineers seem to believe that only the top 65% of the class deserves As. 65% percent is really not that bad of a percentage but there are currently about 1,100 students in physics 7A so that means about 385 students are going to get Cs or below. And supposing this occurs just about every semester physics 7A is offered (both fall and spring)…</p>
<p>It seems like for engineering requirements there are some secret grade restrictions that keep engineering student GPAs down…</p>
<p>“but there are currently about 1,100 students in physics 7A so that means about 385 students are going to get Cs or below.”</p>
<p>OK heartless as this sounds, in most Physics 7-- classes, excluding the honors sequence, I have found the students deserve the curve they get. However, the professor has to be a decent exam-writer, meaning that the exam should not be too easy or too abstrusely evil. If too easy, then the curve factor is terrible, because there are lots of high scores, and we don’t end up distinguishing who really knows his/her stuff. If too hard, well you have what Sakky has mentioned - averages of 25 percent, and those getting 30 percents getting A’s, even if they don’t really know what they’re talking about.</p>
<p>A healthy balance is needed. However, with the correct test, I think in such a class the percentages are kind of accurate, and even in some cases generous. </p>
<p>However, if you take a typical EECS course that is graded on a curve, things get more icky. I get the feeling someone who does poorly in 7A because of not being able to handle it is getting a wonderful sign from the heavens not to do too much more engineering, and to change to something else.</p>
<p>Now, of course, the key is to ALLOW them to change gears, not flunk them out. This is where I think Berkeley can use some work.</p>
<p>Yes, for EE 20 for instance, the instructor explicitly says the department makes him keep it between a 2.7-2.9 average…and he tries to bump it up to the highest average possible.</p>
<p>Newmassdad – “But heck, Sakky, you could care less about actual knowledge. To you, it is the “argument” that counts”</p>
<p>seriously, no matter what you believe, what is the point of this? These kinds of attacks make for an uninteresting thread – if you state an actual point, I’m interested to know. I just don’t see the point of launching attacks like these on what is anyway an anonymous forum. Unless you have a specific suggestion to posters how to make themselves clearer of course.</p>
<p>The curve for the Physics 7 series is 25-40-35, so 25% (not 65%) of students get As, 40% get Bs, and 35% get Cs or lower. I’m not sure where this standard come from.</p>
<p>I think the real problem is, like I said, that of the differing grading standards among different majors. Maybe you could say that the bottom 35% of the Physics 7 students deserve C’s or worse. But I would then ask why do the worst students in certain humanities or social science courses nevertheless end up with A-minus’s? Again, to recap the story I mentioned before: the guy who never went to class, never bothered to do any of the readings, basically compiled his papers from snippets of the user reviews on Amazon, and freely admitted that he had no idea what was going on in the class and didn’t care, nevertheless still got an A-minus. </p>
<p>If the bottom 35% of the physics students should get bad grades, then the bottom 35% of the humanities and social science students should also get bad grades. Why not? What’s fair is fair.</p>
<p>“If the bottom 35% of the physics students should get bad grades, then the bottom 35% of the humanities and social science students should also get bad grades. Why not? What’s fair is fair.”</p>
<p>Yeah I guess =] it’s too bad all of us don’t have it as bad. I think in the case of the physics 7- series though, the standards aren’t so ridiculous that I think I’d be so worried…maybe more so in competitive courses like Physics 137, and just the upper division overall. </p>
<p>One might, of course, argue that there is a fuzzier grading standard for most humanities courses, and that there is simply less of a clear distinction between A level work and C level work; now I am sure certain courses are inflated, but hey, that part is life – even at Stanford, I am sure engineering is significantly harder to get A’s in than in many humanities courses; I don’t think Berkeley will be disadvantaged there. I actually don’t have an issue with how they are graded, and mainly think it’s unfair for a student who <em>DECIDES ENGINEERING IS NOT FOR HIM/HER</em> to be “screwed” even if he/she was a pretty darn good student, while a humanities major goes to law school, much happier, while the engineer can potentially flunk out and have no options after having a bad time upon trying engineering. I think the most important thing is flexibility to bail out when necessary…and also, the idea of maintaining a Caltech or MIT system for the beginning year is good too, because the try-out period won’t stain a student forever at all.</p>
<p>I.e. it is just true that certain majors are harder than others on average…though heck, an English major could take certain evilly insane classes which would make the major really hard. Or, one could choose to take it easier. In a sense, how hard one works never really correlates that well to pure comfort - for instance, a physics major who works really really hard and goes to grad school may eventually have to bail out of physics professions entirely, finding no place in academia. As I think Sakky himself mentioned in a much older thread, that is life. Not every humanities major will get into law school, and not every engineering major will make it to grad school or to ideal careers, and not every math major will make it to the academic position of choice. </p>
<p>What one can do, however, is refine the system so that those struggling in harder majors can bail out without a problem. And, I suppose, make the harder majors not so prone to flunking students out.</p>
<p>I’ve heard this argument numerous times, and I don’t buy it. Specifically, the argument presumes that just because you may not be able to make a clear distinction between A-level work and C-level work, you should presume to give everybody A’s. Why should we make that presumption? Why not just give everybody C’s, or worse? That is to say, the prevailing assumption is that you will probably get an A in an American Studies class unless your work is truly egregiously bad, whereupon you might get a C. However, we could just as easily change that prevailing assumption to say that you will probably get a C in that class unless your work is truly outstandingly good whereupon you might get an A. In other words, you change the baseline grading assumption. </p>
<p>Lest anybody think such a notion to be ridiculous, I would point out that that’s basically what the Berkeley humanities PhD programs entail within the dissertation process. You can’t just hand in any old mediocre dissertation and expect your committee to award a PhD to you. You have to complete an exceptionally high quality dissertation before they will grant you the degree. They don’t just say: “Well, since we can’t really tell the difference between a strong dissertation and a weak one, we’re just going to let everybody graduate.” In fact, the exact opposite occurs; they assume that you won’t graduate unless you can greatly impress the committee into convincing you that you should graduate. That’s why something like half of the humanities PhD students won’t actually finish the degree, and those that do generally take 6+ years to do so. Hence, that begs the question of why those departments can enforce rigorous standards for their graduate students, but can’t or won’t do so for their undergraduate students. </p>
<p>Furthermore, even if there is some necessary difference between the standards enforced between grad and undergrad students, that still leaves the question open of what it really means to get an A in engineering vs. getting a C. Again, to take it back to my old engineering exam example of which the mean was a 25%, what exactly is the difference between getting a 30% (which was worth an A) on an exam vs. getting a 20% (which was worth, at best, a C)? Either way, the students basically knew nothing. The only difference seemed to be in ‘degrees of nothingness’. Did the guy who got the 30% really know much more than the guy who got the 20%? I think it’s more fair to say that both of them knew the material to the same level: that is, they both knew nothing.</p>
<p>One major problem that I’ve found is that people assume that just because a test score is graded/calculated numerically, it is automatically assumed to be more rigorous and measurable than is a qualitative grade. Yet the fact is, all of the components of a numerical grade are arbitrary. For example, in the engineering exam example above, the exam consisted of 3 questions. The average test score was a 25%, which meant that the average student couldn’t even answer a single question completely correctly. Hence, the scoring was all determined by partial credit. Yet who’s to say what partial answer is worth what number of partial points? If calculating a certain precursor equation is deemed to be worth 10 points of partial credit, why isn’t it worth 5 or 15? If you do all of the steps correctly, but just make a silly numerical error at the very end, you might get 30 points out of the possible 33. But why 30 - why not some other value? If you have no idea what you are doing (i.e. you don’t write down any of the steps because you don’t know what they are), but just happen to luckily guess the right answer anyway, should you get all of the points for the question? Should you get any points at all? These are all arbitrary choices.</p>
<p>YEah I mean, I guess it’s a good thing I said “one could make the argument…” instead of “I make the argument…” because I do personally think the inflation isn’t exactly great.</p>
<p>And I am also highly sympathetic towards the point about exam scores being quite arbitrary at a point. It is, ultimately, a subjective choice of the instructor to include certain kinds of problems on the exams, and it is somewhat arbitrary in the end what numerical grades are awarded. A thoughtful instructor can probably manage to award relatively fair letter grades, but yes…there is a discrepancy between better scores and actual genuine greater understanding; I take the same issue with the “meaninglessness” of the high score of 30. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, I do think there are some majors which are just not <em>designed</em> to be as tough. There are others where you can take it to many levels – as I said, an English class could be DEADLY tough – I know some of the big, fat Chaucer books some of these people look at in middle English. It strikes terror into me. I’m not so worried about some majors <em>designed</em> to be creampuffy so people can get a degree…as long as one has the <em>choice</em> to bail out from a tough major to an easier one. Then again, I can see why it might be argued that ideally, there should be an equal standard of rigor maintained.</p>
<p>If I had to make it one way, I’d say the standards in the physics 7 series seem pretty fair, as I think a concerted effort by a good student at mastering the material can actually reasonably likely earn an A, and a decent but not so stellar effort actually earns a B. There are courses where it’s your silly 25% and 30% game…</p>
<p>What I absolutely ADORE, though, are the courses which are high level and are based on thoughtfully written problem sets instead of exams. I think they highly decrease the likelihood of arbitrary grading prevailing…</p>
<p>But what if the entire class is full of students who make a “concerted effort…at mastering the material” and their scores on all exams are fairly concentrated around the mean? Yet, according to policy 35% of the class still have to get Cs and below. This is just a hypothetical scenario, but I just don’t feel that it’d be very fair to use that sort of curve in this case since all the grades differ from one another so marginally.</p>
<p>Well yeah lower division courses are pretty limited in how sophisticated the grading scheme is. The issue is they are big - a student is just a statistic. I only mean that in general the difficulty to get A’s, etc, seems to be reasonable. </p>
<p>The basic question is: how likely is it that everyone will make such a concerted effort? Close to no chance, I’d say. Not that this is <em>IDEAL</em> to make assumptions as such, but I think it’s almost out of the question that everyone is going to be up to a high level in those classes. This is the case where curves are somewhat OK. When it’s competitive and you get curves, prof’s have to make exams really weird and tricky, and you get the 25% vs. 30% (nonexistent) distinction determining grades. Or some variation.</p>
<p>All in all, I am in favor of small classes, fewer exams, more challenging, thought-provoking homework sets composed specially by the professor determining grades.</p>
<p>There are plenty of huge lower-division humanities/socsci courses. Poli Sci 1 is huge: in the Fall 2008 semester, it was about as large as both Physics 7A lectures combined. Yet I don’t think anybody would dispute that it is easier to get higher grades in Poli Sci 1 than in Physics 7A. Hence, I don’t know that the size of the class is really correlated with the grading. I suspect it has to do with what I said before: some disciplines simply grade harder than others, and to this day I still have never heard of a convincing rationale for why that should be. Like I said, if the bottom 35% of the Physics 7 students should get C’s or worse, then so should the bottom 35% of the Poli Sci 1 students. What’s fair is fair.</p>
<p>Sakky, to make it clear my point in the above “Well yeah lower division courses are pretty limited in how sophisticated the grading scheme is. The issue is they are big - a student is just a statistic. I only mean that in general the difficulty to get A’s, etc, seems to be reasonable.” was to dill_scout saying that the 35% get C’s necessarily factor could work unfairly against students. </p>
<p>I think the fact that <em>CERTAIN PERCENTAGES</em> get C’s rests on the fact that there’s less personal consideration given to the grade. In a course with 15 students, the prof knows the students by name, and we know very well what he expects. I’ve been in both 6 student math courses and a 300 student technical course. The big difference in how sophisticated + personalized the grading scheme comes from the difference in class size.</p>
<p>However, yes, some disciplines are harder than others, as you say for whatever potentially illegitimate reason, and the percentages for Polisci 1 may be unfairly easier on students than those for Physics 7A. </p>
<p>What my point was that 7A’s grading scheme seems relatively reasonable for a lower division course, and sure, ideally Polisci 1 would have a similar distribution of grades. I don’t like it to be either too hard [where it’s arbitrary and you’re distinguishing 25/100 from 30/100 as if it’s a huge deal], or too easy - where high grades are meaningless.</p>
<p>I have an explanation for why different departments have different grading policies such that the grading standards are different. If you’re in engineering/CS, your prospects for a job after college are much better than if you’re in the humanities. All you have to do is graduate with that Berkeley CS degree and you’ll be in demand for pretty good paying jobs. Such is not the case with an English degree. Doesn’t seem fair for English students to suffer as much as engineering students when their job prospects suck (relatively) coming out of undergrad, does it?</p>
<p>Why are humanities graded easier? Well, if you’re in the humanities, you’re much more likely to go to grad school. Grades are much more important to grad schools than employers. So grading the humanities easier and making it easier for students to get into grad school is a way of “making up” for the lackluster job prospects with the undergrad degree alone.</p>
<p>Look at it this way. Engineering tailors to getting a job after undergrad. They weed out students with harsh grading, but as a result the quality of students that graduate with degrees are higher, building its reputation and ensuring students coming out of undergrad will have an easier time finding jobs. Humanities tailor to getting into grad school. They have more lenient grading as a result.</p>
<p>To the above – I wonder if this is entirely a complete view, given majors such as theoretical physics are also graded on an EXTREMELY evil scale [heck, my EECS friends are scared to death of taking certain physics upper division courses]. </p>
<p>A physics major can certainly end up trying to go for academia, and not getting at all what he/she wants eventually, and certainly can end up without a high-paying job, as relatively secure as the engineer’s future may be. And guess what! A theoretical physicist is probably pretty likely to want grad school. </p>
<p>Same holds for math majors, of course. Well, maybe a math major can turn around and become an actuary or something. But certainly any pure science [and the corresponding difficulty as compared to the ease of sustaining monetary gain] seems to be a big question. </p>
<p>As another point – one of our main suggestions in this thread has been that engineering + other majors [if not all majors] should be allowed to have a test run like they do in schools like MIT and Caltech. I think that system is quite productive. I mean, I don’t even favor making the grading standards easier [unless certain courses are totally ridiculous, to the point Sakky was saying a score of 30 out of 100 could be an A while a 25 could be a B or something], given I expect the engineers to be challenged. But <em>somewhat</em> level playing field is important, I think.</p>