is it hard to graduate from berkeley?

vicissitudes · February 2, 2009, 2:09pm

Of course this doesn’t help explain every major out there, but it explains what we’re seeing better than any other theories I’ve come across, anyway. Why are physics and math graded harshly? First of all, they are prereqs for engineering. That probably has a lot to do with it. My other explanation is that the sciences in general have developed a culture of harsh grading, because most graduates of the sciences tend to do pretty well, and they need to weed people, whether it’s to weed people out of engineering or weed people out of pre-med. They’ve developed a culture of weeding and it’s very hard to change that. I’ll give you an example. CS at Berkeley used to be impacted, which meant an intro class such as 61A was a weeder course. Now that CS is unimpacted, did that change? Not really. They’re still using the same projects, the same tests, the same grading standard. In fact, the instructor for that course, Brian Harvey (who has been teaching it since CS was impacted), insist that not only are they not weeding the students, but that it was never their intention! I find that a bit hard to swallow.

I caught up with the thread a bit after I posted and the “test run” suggestion isn’t a bad one. I would support a system that encourages first years to take a larger variety of classes. I think that would work better than giving students the opportunity to switch majors during their first two years (most of them don’t know what they want to major in anyway). A system, perhaps, similar to that at MIT (where first-years are graded P/NP), or that of Stanford (where you can take an “exploratory course” and drop it even after the final), or that of Harvard (where, during the first two weeks, the students are encouraged to attend as many classes as they can and see what interests them). As much as I dislike the “engineering trap”, as sakky so fondly refer to it as, there is a good reason why engineering at Berkeley is so heavily impacted. EECS, the most impacted engineering major, is already one of the largest majors on campus. If Berkeley were to uncap all of engineering, I’m not sure that it would be better for the school or its engineering students in the long run, unless some serious administrative changes come along with it, and I’m not sure what those changes would be.

mathboy98 · February 2, 2009, 2:44pm

“Brian Harvey (who has been teaching it since CS was impacted), insist that not only are they not weeding the students, but that it was never their intention! I find that a bit hard to swallow.”

Well, as someone who was in that course, to be brutally honest, if one isn’t able to handle 61A, it’s very likely one will run into problems later. I don’t at all see a problem with its grading standards. The main problem I see is with “traps.” All in all, I think the first semester or two being a test run sounds a great idea, and I really haven’t heard anything legitimately wrong with it.

“irst of all, they are prereqs for engineering. That probably has a lot to do with it. My other explanation is that the sciences in general have developed a culture of harsh grading, because most graduates of the sciences tend to do pretty well, and they need to weed people, whether it’s to weed people out of engineering or weed people out of pre-med.”

My friend has been doing practical EECS since he was a kid…he knows so incredibly much, it’s scary. And is also smart overall. However, he certainly does not have to take theoretical physics or particularly abstract math. I really can’t agree that graduates of the sciences need do particularly well compared to humanities majors - not the PURE science majors anyway. I think someone doing a humanities degree and going on to law school or something is more likely to do well financially than a theoretical physics major anyway. Not easy to make it in academia. The reasoning that humanities courses are graded easier because their students are more likely to go to grad school neglects the non-engineering + less practical majors, I think, which are still significantly tougher to do well in.

Now I’m not myself very bitter, given things haven’t been hurting for me as of late, but I can definitely see why someone could complain about unfairness of grading standards.

mathboy98 · February 2, 2009, 2:46pm

“Of course this doesn’t help explain every major out there, but it explains what we’re seeing better than any other theories I’ve come across, anyway.”

Well, perhaps there is NOT a particularly good reason things are the way they are. It’s also a possibility. Remember, there are very key differences in how the College of Engineering and L&S are run, and some of them just come down to the choices of the people running them! They need not have entirely rational reasons one college is run one way as opposed to another…except that whoever’s making the rules likes them the way they are.

vicissitudes · February 2, 2009, 10:51pm

Okay, so what? There are a good number of students in EECS/CS that have gotten through all their CS classes with pretty bad grades. They have GPA in the low 2’s. They struggled through 61A, B, C, and barely survived. They didn’t do well in 61A at all, but they can still get through all the classes and graduate.

But forget about that for a minute. Let’s suppose for a minute that if you can’t handle 61A, you won’t be able to handle 61B or C. Why is that? I will argue that it’s not because 61A is easy. On the contrary, not only is 61A too hard, but 61B and 61C are also too hard! All the intro CS classes are weeders. But none of them have to be, if we were to accept the notion that CS isn’t capped anymore and they’re not trying to weed their students. But clearly they still are.

I’m not talking about your friend. I’m talking about Berkeley engineering students who have to take physics/math to get their degree. Because of that (at least partly), intro physics/math classes are graded harshly.

Yeah, maybe there isn’t a good reason. I’m sure there is no one theory or a group of theory that perfectly explains exactly how different departments grades differently. But that’s a rather defeatist attitude to have. If everyone has this attitude for everything, and just accept that “things are the way they are”, then no one would try to change anything for the better.

mathboy98 · February 3, 2009, 1:59am

Uhhhhm first, my friend up there is an EECS major at Berkeley…and I was once in the major too. I am perfectly aware of the requirements – math through 54, and physics through 7B. You were saying above that math and physics are graded harshly because they’re prerequisites to engineering…I cannot imagine what you’re trying to say, given that’s true only for a MINISCULE portion of the math and physics courses offered. Most engineers will give up on math and physics, and only a few overenthusiastic ones go on to other math courses, and Physics 137AB, etc.

“But that’s a rather defeatist attitude to have. If everyone has this attitude for everything, and just accept that “things are the way they are”, then no one would try to change anything for the better.”

No, it doesn’t work that way…I am saying we don’t try to justify the current system if we can’t do so productively. If there are things wrong with it, accept that. And try to change them, sure. You’re trying to suggest there’s a rational reason things are the way they are, and it’s no defeatist attitude to consider there’s a problem with that logic.

Physics 137AB are HARDLY required for a majority of engineering areas, certainly not for engineers who want a professional career. Maybe some engineering grad students deal with stuff like that, but that’s about it. And yet these courses are graded WAY more brutally than Physics 7A and 7B. I don’t see your explanation. I think I gotta agree with Sakky that there ain’t a brilliant reason why some majors are just graded much harder than others.

Anyway, I don’t believe Harvey is completely lying when he says 61A ain’t a weeder like other courses. But that is my opinion, and I am willing to agree it is shaky at best.

sakky · February 3, 2009, 2:55am

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?

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.

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.

That’s my theory anyway…

Which was precisely Tax Bear’s argument.

While I certainly agree that the above perhaps is why certain majors are graded more harshly than others, the salient question is why should it be that way? This gets down to a basic philosophical question: should course grading be affected by future salaries, and if so, why?

I would argue that grading shouldn’t be affected by future salaries. If you know the material very well, then you should get a top grade. If you know the material poorly, then you should get a poor grade. Whether that material can then be used to get a high paying job or not should be irrelevant to the question of whether you actually know that material. In other words, if you take a course in American Studies and don’t bother to do any of the reading, don’t even bother to show up to class, don’t learn anything, and don’t even want to learn anything, Berkeley shouldn’t give you a top grade anyway just because that course does not provide a direct link to a high paying job. If nothing else, that’s an insult to those students who took that American Studies course who actually did study hard and learned the material.

A bit of history may be instructive here. Humanities and social science courses didn’t always used to be graded so easily. Gentlemen’s C’s used to be the norm of the day across all disciplines, and many students used to flunk out of humanities and soc-sci disciplines, just as they do in engineering and natural science disciplines. However, during the 1960’s, humanities and social science professors across the country decided to inflate grades to allow students to maintain their student deferments and therefore avoid exposure to a draft for the Vietnam War with which those professors personally opposed (although, interestingly, engineering and natural science professors didn’t seem to care if their students flunked out and were henceforth drafted to fight.) The grade-inflation draft-dodge scheme may have been especially prevalent at Berkeley because of the school’s especially ferocious opposition to the War as I’m sure we all remember from our history of the school.

Yet I’m quite certain that engineering and natural science majors paid better than humanities and soc-sci disciplines even before the Vietnam War. After all, if it’s true that you can’t really get a good job with an English degree today, well, what could you get with one in the 1950’s? It was draft-dodging, rather than differentials in pay, that caused certain majors to become grade inflated at the expense of others, and nowadays, those differentials in pay are now used as a justification…but only after the fact.

Furthermore, I think the real problem is not that some engineering/nat-sci students get screwed, although that problem is indeed serious. I believe in free markets, and the fact that certain majors pay more than others is a simple price signal that indicates that the nation’s economy wants more people to choose certain majors than others. The market is signaling that we need more EECS students and fewer film studies majors. However, differentials in grading serve to distort this signal by impelling risk-averse students to choose “easy” majors.

Slicmlic2001 said it himself: he might have tried EECS but for the risk to his grades. But what’s so bad about him trying? He might have turned out to be the next great engineer who would have invented something that makes the Internet look like child’s play. We’ll never know; he wouldn’t dare to even try because he (rationally) didn’t want to put his GPA on the line. When you punish failure, you discourage people from trying new things. One of the most important reasons why other nations lag the United States, especially Silicon Valley, in technological innovation is because those nations have cultures that punitively punish failure. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, doesn’t punish failure - if anything, it rewards failure. Founding a failed startup is actually seen as a badge of honor in Silicon Valley because it shows that at least you had the gumption to try.

I leave you with the Jennifer Granholm example that I discussed before. At age 18, she went to Hollywood to try to become a movie actress. If she succeeded, she might have become the next Marilyn Monroe. (Granholm is certainly beautiful enough to qualify). Yet she failed. But that wasn’t a problem… because it wasn’t an academic failure. She was still able to go to Berkeley with a pristine academic record (because she hadn’t actually “failed” any classes), graduating Phi Beta Kappa and then matriculating at Harvard Law. Now she’s the Governor of Michigan.

Think about what that means. Granholm tried to become a Hollywood actress. If she had succeeded, she might have become a millionaire movie superstar. She failed, but she was still able to become a highly successful lawyer and politician. Nobody cared that she was a failed actress. They certainly didn’t punish her for it. Harvard Law didn’t tell her: “Between the ages of 18-21 you were a failed actress, therefore we’re not going to admit you.” The Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa committee didn’t say “Since you were a failed actress for several years, we’re going to deny you our honors.”

To give you another example, let’s say that, at age 18, instead of going to Berkeley, I immediately move to Silicon Valley and start my own tech company. If it succeeds, I’ll be a millionaire. If it fails, oh well, I’ll just go to Berkeley, and maybe I’ll get top grades and get into top grad schools and perhaps win the Rhodes. Nobody will care that I had failed at becoming a tech entrepreneur. Maybe I built some terrible technology. Maybe I was just a terrible businessman. But the point is, nobody will care, because it wasn’t an academic failure.

So, really, what is the difference between me starting a Silicon Valley tech company at 18 and not succeeding, or Jennifer Granholm trying to become an actress at age 18 and not succeeding, and somebody taking engineering/science courses at Berkeley at age 18 and not succeeding? In each case, the person tried a venture that didn’t work out. The major difference, obviously, is that the first two people were allowed to move on with the rest of their lives with a clean slate. The last person is not. But why? Why is it OK for somebody to start an engineering *company * and fail, but not OK for that same person to take an engineering class and fail?

This all gets down to a sad truism at many schools, not only Berkeley: it’s (sadly) better to not even take a difficult class at all than to take it and get a bad grade. But all that does is simply discourages people from taking difficult classes.

mathboy98 · February 3, 2009, 3:12am

All of the above AND, might I add, all my remarks that there are majors whose difficulty in no way is surpassed by engineering + in no way are stable paths to a great career, except for the exceptional academics on average.

I really take issue with the very premise that difficult majors tend to lead to higher paying jobs anyway. I think for instance that it’s pretty safe to say physics is a much harder major on average than economics. And a much rougher path to tread. Now, econ isn’t a creampuff in my books at all, but this is just an example of how the premise that hard majors reflect better salaries breaks down.

Which all the better suggests that we may have EVEN LESS of a rational reason for maintaining uneven grading systems. I don’t say to make economics harder…I don’t think it’s easy as is. But I definitely reject the premise that there needn’t be even grading standards because toughly graded majors are high reward ones.

In vicissitudes’s defense though, I believe he/she acknowledged that adopting the MIT system would be a good idea. This is at least reasonable, whatever I think about the other points.

vicissitudes · February 3, 2009, 3:19am

I don’t think my argument is “precisely” Tax Bear’s argument. Specifically, I have no problem with rewarding failure, which is a large part of your argument. If someone wants to go try out EECS for a semester, do badly, transfer to another major, and have his slate wiped clean, I have no problem with that. But, if that person tries out EECS and EECS is graded as easily as American Studies, then I would have a problem with that. Therein lies the difference. What I’m arguing for is a system in which EECS is graded harder than American Studies, but if you want to try out EECS, do poorly (because it’s graded harshly), decide it’s not for you, and transfer out, it won’t hurt you.

Sure, I understand that, ideally, your grade should be a reflection of how much material you learn. It’s not fair that someone doing AS and learns very little can get an A while someone doing CS and learns a lot gets a B. But, it’s also not fair that someone who graduates with a 3.0 in EECS has much better job prospects than someone who graduates with a 4.0 in AS.

Let’s do a hypothetical example. Berkeley decides to grade every major the exact same way. Student A puts in about 10 hours a week into his studies, and graduates AS with a 3.5 GPA. Student B, who came from a similar background with similar capabilities, also puts in about 10 hours a week into his studies, and graduates EECS with a 3.5 GPA. Both students are essentially the same person, putting in the same effort. Yet Student B comes out of college working at a computer software company and earns 70,000 a year, while Student A comes out of college working at a Starbucks earning 30,000 a year. How is this fair?

So now the question is, which is the lesser evil? Grading different majors with different standards may seem unfair on a theoretical level, but grading different majors with the same standards produces a result that’s very unfair on a practical level. I think I would rather take the first scenario over the second.

mathboy98 · February 3, 2009, 3:55am

OK the above is sounding more reasonable. The one issue I take with it still is that I think the margin seems too high.

I still don’t see that majors that are graded hard are intrinsically good for career prospects.
Honestly, I’d favor making EECS less of a brutally competitive major [though a solid one], and same for any similar majors, and make whatever easier major less of a creampuff. I can, however, understand that some majors being tougher to an extent just has to do with the subject nature. I think EECS could be less of a slaughterfest [unnecessarily] at times, given it’s not that students really learn more or become better engineers because of especially brutal competition. As long as the curriculum is very hard, giving out a few better grades [as long as it isn’t pure inflation] is not bad.

sakky · February 3, 2009, 7:15pm

Sure, I understand that, ideally, your grade should be a reflection of how much material you learn. It’s not fair that someone doing AS and learns very little can get an A while someone doing CS and learns a lot gets a B. But, it’s also not fair that someone who graduates with a 3.0 in EECS has much better job prospects than someone who graduates with a 4.0 in AS.

Let’s do a hypothetical example. Berkeley decides to grade every major the exact same way. Student A puts in about 10 hours a week into his studies, and graduates AS with a 3.5 GPA. Student B, who came from a similar background with similar capabilities, also puts in about 10 hours a week into his studies, and graduates EECS with a 3.5 GPA. Both students are essentially the same person, putting in the same effort. Yet Student B comes out of college working at a computer software company and earns 70,000 a year, while Student A comes out of college working at a Starbucks earning 30,000 a year. How is this fair?

So now the question is, which is the lesser evil? Grading different majors with different standards may seem unfair on a theoretical level, but grading different majors with the same standards produces a result that’s very unfair on a practical level. I think I would rather take the first scenario over the second.

And here we fundamentally disagree. Like I said, salaries are fundamentally market-driven. They are price signals that reflect economic value. They are therefore not fair only in the sense that the world isn’t fair because certain skills and traits are more valuable than others. The fact of the matter is, software expertise is more economically valuable than expertise about American studies, and differing salaries are a mere reflection of that fact. Somebody who didn’t even go to college at all, but instead took that 4 years to learn how to write software will probably also earn a higher salary than somebody who got a degree in American Studies.

Let me put it to you this way. It’s not “fair” that Brad Pitt makes far more money in one year than I ever will in my whole lifetime. But the simple fact of the matter is, Brad Pitt is more handsome than I am such that he can draw a huge audience to any of his movies. Nobody is going to pay to see me in a movie. That’s just a simple market reality and the differing salaries are a reflection of that market reality. Markets are by definition not fair because some goods (i.e. skills and traits) are more valuable in the market than others, and always will be. Wishing this fact away will not make it go away. Market realities will always exist.

But what you don’t have to do is create new sources of unfairness. Software skills are more valuable than American Studies skills in the market, and nothing is going to change that basic economic reality. But the answer is not to then generate an artificial source of unfairness - through widely differential grading schemes - to attempt to ‘counterbalance’ the unfairness in the market. For example, just because I am not a handsome millionaire movie star like Brad Pitt doesn’t mean he should have been graded harder in his college courses than I was.

Otherwise, what you end up with are distorted price signals and, hence, an inefficient labor market, which is precisely what we have now. If the salaries for engineers are higher than that for American Studies majors, then that is a price signal that indicates that the nation demands more engineers and fewer American Studies students, which therefore should encourage more students to major in engineering and fewer to major in American Studies. “Compensatory” grading confounds this signal. Slicmlic2001 has admitted that he might have majored in engineering were it not for the (relatively) difficult grading. Plenty of other people have done the same. People are therefore incentivized to make an economically inefficient choice.

The bottom line is that course grading should not be used to ‘compensate’ for inherent differences in marketability. After all, there are lots of marketable skills that can be learned outside of the classroom. Why should we then single out only coursework for compensation? Like I said, the guy who doesn’t even go to college at all but instead just learns software development by himself is going to make more money than a guy who gets a degree in American Studies. Certainly nobody can ‘punish’ the former guy with harsh grading (because that guy doesn’t even take any courses at all). Heck, a guy who does major in American Studies - but learns software development in his spare time - is also going to make more money than somebody who majors in American Studies but does nothing with his spare time. Does that mean that we should now grade the second guy easier than the first guy? Or maybe we should just include a whole bunch of extra bad grades on the first guy’s transcript to reflect the fact that he took his spare time to learn marketable software skills? Jahvid Best is probably going to the NFL where he will clearly make more money than almost any other Cal grad. Does that mean we should include a whole bunch of “football classes” in his transcript - and then mark them with bad grades - to compensate for the fact that he is using Cal to hone highly marketable football skills and the other students have no comparable opportunity?

Put another way, why is it perfectly fine for me to develop marketable skills that will boost my salary outside the classroom, but if I try to develop them *inside * the classroom, then that’s not fair, and so I need to be compensated with harsher grading?

sakky · February 3, 2009, 10:43pm

Heck, now that I think about it, my analysis applies even inside the classroom, as long as they are classrooms of a certain type. For example, I don’t think that getting a PhD in humanities at Berkeley is any easier - either in terms of total time required or in terms of grading (as grad school grading is rather inflated regardless of discipline and practically nobody actually flunks out of grad school from bad grades) - than is getting a PhD in engineering at Berkeley, despite the fact that the latter is clearly more lucrative. Nobody feels the need to “compensate” the humanities grad students with easier grades just because their courses are less marketable.

So, if grad students don’t get ‘compensated’, why should the undergrads?

I suppose one counterargument might be that grad students can’t really change majors the way that undergrads do, and so there would be no need to ‘steer’ grad students into different majors via compensatory grading (if such steerage was in fact desirable, which I would argue it is not). While it is true that grad students can’t change majors, grad students - especially those in the pure research phase - have great freedom to choose the classes they want to take. For example, during the recent Wall Street boom, many physics, math, and engineering PhD students took graduate level financial economics courses on the side, the rationale being that if they couldn’t get a decent research job upon graduation, they would get jobs in the financial services industry. At the height of the boom, somebody with a technical PhD and training in graduate finance coursework might make over $500k in his first year at a hedge fund. But that doesn’t mean that those grad finance courses ‘compensated’ for their eminent marketability by flunking people out left and right. The grading in those courses - as in most grad seminars - was relatively relaxed: certainly no harsher than, say, a theoretical physics grad seminar, which has limited market demand.

So, I ask again, why should the undergrads enjoy compensatory grading when the grad students don’t?

mathboy98 · February 3, 2009, 11:02pm

Hm – lemme ask - vicissitudes, what is ultimately your position: do you actually believe that the way certain majors are graded unduly more harshly than others? And that the reason several subjects outside of engineering + the sciences are graded easier is that their majors have worse job prospects?

I just am not seeing what the question being debated is here. A math major choosing to go into theory and a humanities major trying to go into academia both face an issue, which is that something like engineering is likely going to get a better paying job, more quickly. One major is graded harder than the other for sure. Same with a theoretical physics major.

One could argue that the math major could go out into something in the financial professions. Well, the humanities major could try to go to business or law school instead of going into academia. Either way, they’re grading all humanities majors the same regardless of their intents, and same with the math and physics majors.

Further, one really couldn’t argue that economics is a tougher major than physics at Berkeley.

Is my point clear or not? That there is really not a great correlation in the first place between how much money you make and how hard your major is. I’d say the best way is to make engineering + physics less of a slaughterfest [grade as hard as you need to in order to make students learn stuff really well, but not for brutal competition’s sake], and the very easy majors not so easy.

I don’t understand what you are disputing, vicissitudes [not meant as a jab really, I am genuinely asking, and would appreciate clarification].

mathboy98 · February 3, 2009, 11:04pm

I.e., I don’t believe your position is the same as Tax Bear’s, which was much more extreme. But I would like to know what it is, and perhaps in relation to my above words. Thanks.

vicissitudes · February 4, 2009, 12:58am

I don’t see what I’m doing as creating a new source of unfairness. The realities of the job market are inherently unfair. Given this unfairness, it makes more sense to align the difficulties of career paths to such a system, rather than fight it (which is ultimately impossible; jobs will always pay differently).

Let’s take your Brad Pitt example. It is incredibly difficult to be as attractive and as talented as him. You’d have to be born with good looks, first of all. Sure, that’s not under your control, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s really hard to be naturally good-looking. Ask any struggling actor how difficult it is to get a leading role in a major motion picture. Because it’s so difficult to get such a job, it compensates very well. This makes sense.

I don’t agree with your view of the market because salaries are not a direct effect of supply-demand. Take Bill Gates for example. He makes a huge salary. Does that mean that the market demands a lot of CEOs of computer OS companies? Of course not. It’s because his position is highly valued in society, and his path to his “career” was not only very difficult but required a lot of luck. Not just anyone could have done what he did. Let’s take actors as another example, since we’re on the subject. Does the fact that A-list actors make huge amounts of money signal that the market demands more actors? No. On the contrary, there are probably more aspiring actors than society needs, which is why making a living as an actor is incredibly unreliable.

On the topic of marketable skills that can be learned outside of the classroom. I would argue that learning to program outside of the classroom is arguably harder than learning to program inside the classroom. You need to be much more self-motivated and organized. You need to find out exactly what you need to learn, what’s marketable, and even then, you’ll probably still have a harder time getting a job than someone with a degree from Berkeley. Even you have to admit someone going into the computer industry without even a bachelor’s will have a hard time getting a job. Someone who learns software programming skills outside the classroom face a whole new set of challenges, and I definitely think it’s tougher to self-study and get a job that way than to breeze through university as an AS major. That’s why AS majors aren’t compensated as much. Greater difficulty of career path -> better compensation. Of course this isn’t true in all cases, but I think there’s a correlation there.

It’s not really fair to compare the way undergrads are graded to the way graduate students are graded. There’s a whole new set of expectations for graduate students. There are high academic expectations for someone who has a PhD. This isn’t necessarily true for undergrads. For example, many EECS majors don’t do that well, graduate with a GPA in the low 2’s, and still manage to find tech jobs and do pretty well for themselves. Their academic expectations aren’t that high, especially if they have solid practical skills. This is generally not true for graduate students. The bar that’s set for them is much higher, so it’s understandable that there’s no “fluff grading.”

My fundamental disagreement with sakky is that while he would like all departments to have the same grading standard, I think a varying grading standard makes more sense in the context of varying compensation after you graduate.

mathboy98 · February 4, 2009, 2:20am

“My fundamental disagreement with sakky is that while he would like all departments to have the same grading standard, I think a varying grading standard makes more sense in the context of varying compensation after you graduate.”

OK, so just to make it clear, you’d be in favor of theoretical physics being graded somewhat easier than say, engineering?

I don’t know, I mean…to not just you, but anyone in general, why not grade students so they learn the material of their major courses -it’s pretty darn hard to even learn physics at a high level pretty well, without trying to fight against especially evil exams + professors. That really makes the most sense to me.
I understand this is somewhat vague, but I think it’s nice to give discretion to instructors, so they can run it as they see fit for the batch of students given. Rather than creating minimum and maximum GPA caps at extremes. I don’t favor exceptionally hard or easy grading in any major.

mathboy98 · February 4, 2009, 2:25am

Can I also ask, vicissitudes: what is the objective of grading certain majors much easier? Say major 1 will make like 40K, and major 2 will start at 80K. What benefit do you see of allowing major 1 to be graded very easily? I mean, what if those guys get B’s instead of A’s based on their performance? I’d say that improves the fundamental integrity of the grading system. Is that B going to give the major 1 type lower jobs? I’m not sure.

sakky · February 4, 2009, 4:52am

I think we should explore this analogy further. The fact of the matter is - you said it yourself - Brad Pitt is far more handsome than I am. That’s simply a natural gift. Whether he ended up then becoming a famous movie star or not, the bottom line is that he will always have an easier life than I will, simply because he’s good looking and I am not. In other words, he will always have an innate advantage in getting any type of job that involves good looks, whether that’s acting, or modeling, or simply being a successful salesman. (When I used to work as a sales engineer, I noticed that the top sales reps were often times generally handsome and tall men, or drop-dead-gorgeous women.) He can stand up in a room and start talking and have people instantly start listening to whatever he has to say, just because he is handsome.

I don’t have that. That’s not fair. But nobody is proposing that we ‘compensate’ for this unfairness. In other words, nobody is proposing that we start grading handsome people harder than we grade ugly people. But why not, right? We’re trying to correct an injustice, aren’t we? It’s not fair that some people are handsome and others are not, and the way to compensate for that is to give handsome people lower grades. After all, at the end of the day, Brad’s with Angelina Jolie and I’m not. More generally, at the end of the day, a girl would rather be with a handsome guy rather than be with me. That’s not fair, right?

But given that, then we have to accept that numerous sources of unfairness exist, not just physical attractiveness. Some people are simply bigger and stronger than others. Some people are born with natural talent for sports, art, or music. Perhaps more to the point, some people are born smarter than others. Fields Medalist Terence Tao won the International Math Olympiad gold medal when he was just 13 years old - the youngest winner in history, and became the youngest full professor ever at UCLA at age 24. Surely we can agree that what Tao possesses is an inborn gift for mathematics; I could probably spend my whole life learning mathematics and yet still not understand even a single one of his research papers. Plenty of budding academics can’t even get placed at a top school like UCLA at all regardless of their age, much less make it to full professor. {Think about what that means: by age 24, Tao had already secured for himself a guaranteed job for life.}

But that’s not fair. It’s not fair that I wasn’t born with the same mathematical gifts as Tao was. Yes, I’m sure that he worked hard, but even if I worked as hard as he did, I don’t have the talent for math that he does. The result is that he has a tenured faculty position for life at a top school, and I don’t. But I doubt that anybody is seriously proposing that - just because Tao was unfairly born with innate gifts that others don’t have - he should have been graded harder in order to ‘correct’ this unfairness.

Let me make the example even more stark by discussing Berkeley’s perennial bete noire: that school in Palo Alto. I think we can all agree that the average Stanford student comes from a wealthier background than does the average Berkeley student, and surely that advantage in wealth plays some role in those students being admitted to (and being able to afford) Stanford. Richer families can send their kids to private prep schools and pay for expensive SAT tutoring services that poorer families cannot afford. So, perhaps from a social justice standpoint, that means that Stanford students should be graded harder than Berkeley students. But that doesn’t happen - if anything, the exact opposite does - Stanford students are graded easier. In other words, Stanford students, on average, get to enjoy both wealthier upbringings and easier college grading. Nor is any justice to be found from the resulting starting salaries upon graduation. Stanford graduates don’t make less than Berkeley graduates; if anything, they make more. That’s the trifecta! You come from a richer background. You get easier grades. And, you end up making more money. Where’s the justice in that?

Since there are so many sources of “unfairness” in the world, why should Berkeley be so obsessed about one particular source of unfairness? Berkeley is not going around punishing its handsome students with harder grades. Nor does Berkeley go around punishing its wealthier students (and why not? I knew a few Berkeley students who were millionaire trust-fund babies. That’s not fair.). So why should Berkeley be so worried about the supposed unfairness that some majors end up paying more than others, especially when that unfairness is simply due to market realities anyway? Again, I would say that if you really want to search for a source of unfairness, I would say that the simple fact that some people are born into rich families and others are born into poor families is a far more egregious example, for no market reality serves as a justification for that.

Besides, you may not really end up producing all that ‘fairness’ at all. For example, maybe it’s not “fair” that some whiz-kid high school software guy can come to Berkeley and make 6 figures with a degree in EECS, so you decide to ‘punish’ people like that by grading the EECS courses harshly. It’s not “fair” that he happens to be a whiz-kid in a marketable skill like software, but somebody who’s a superstar in the humanities doesn’t really have a highly marketable skill. What’s this computer whiz-kid’s response? He chooses to go to Stanford. In other words, we have just uncovered yet another of the (sadly) many reasons to choose Stanford over Berkeley. Why put up with the harsher grading at Berkeley if you can enjoy the cushier grading at Stanford, especially when Stanford also provides a more prestigious brand name and (on average) a higher starting salary to boot? As I’ve always said, one of the major side-effects of Berkeley’s grading scheme - however “fair” it may be in terms of compensating for salary differentials - is that it simply encourages prospective candidates to not choose Berkeley. Keep in mind that Berkeley’s yield is only about 40%, which is, frankly, not that great for a top school (i.e. HYPSM are all at least 65%). If the grading in the technical majors were easier, then more people would choose to come. But the bottom line is that, as a truism in life, when you choose to ‘punish’ a category of people in the name of ‘fairness’, you simply encourage those people to head elsewhere. {For example, when the nations of SouthEast Asia ‘punished’ their relatively prosperous people of Chinese descent through legally enacted discrimination in the name of economic ‘fairness’, many of them responded by simply emigrating elsewhere such as the United States and depriving their former homelands of the economic growth they generate. }

Actually, salaries are always a direct effect of supply and demand. You have simply not defined supply and demand precisely enough. In fact, you stated the correct logic: the world doesn’t demand just any actor. The world demands A-list actors. Obviously not everybody can be an A-list actor. Very few can. But those very few make a lot of money, and that’s a direct outcome of supply and demand. After all, why pay Brad Pitt millions? Why not just replace him with some other actor who is willing to work for scale and save those millions? Because that other actor isn’t an A-list actor. That other actor wouldn’t be able to sell millions of tickets on opening night simply by the drawing power of his name. Nobody is willing to pay to see that guy, just like nobody is willing to pay to see a movie starring me.

Now, where I agree with you is that being an A-list actor requires a lot of luck, but that’s no different from the fact that being born handsome requires a lot of luck. Being an A-list actor means not just handsomeness, but also a certain drawing “star power”. It also means a lot of simply being in the right place at the right time, for example, Brad Pitt just luckily happened to find his starmaking role in Thelma & Louise which then publicized his name which then created demand for his photos in the glossies, which then resulted in other roles and so forth.

But at the end of the day, the result is that he is now an A-list actor, and I am not. He had better luck than I did. Again, that’s not fair. After all, I want that kind of luck. I never had it. That’s not fair, right? Yet if Brad Pitt were to decide to go back to college, nobody is going to say “Well, you had the incredible luck to become an A-list Hollywood actor, and that’s not fair, so now we’re going to punish you by grading you harshly.”

Let me give you some historical examples. Elisabeth Shue dropped out of Harvard to become an actress, and while she didn’t become a superstar, she did quite well for herself, even garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. I’m sure that that involved a strong degree of luck in addition to her hard work and the fact that she is beautiful (which is also a factor of luck). Then she went back to Harvard to finish her degree. Harvard didn’t say “Well, you’ve benefitted from great luck in becoming a successful Hollywood actress, so now, as a matter of fairness, we have to punish you by grading you harder than everybody else.” Jodie Foster had an iconic Hollywood career, including an Academy Award nomination, before she went to Yale, both because she’s beautiful and because she’s highly talented, which are both matters of luck. Yale didn’t then ‘punish’ her for her great luck by grading her harder than everybody else. But why not, right? After all, everybody knew that she could get high paying Hollywood roles anytime she wanted. That’s not fair - other Yale students didn’t have that. So she should be punished as a matter of fairness, right? Anna Paquin actually won the Academy Award years before she went to Columbia. Columbia didn’t respond by punishing her with harder grading, even though she clearly had better job opportunities than almost any other Columbia student.

I see you also bring up the issue of Bill Gates. I actually think Bill Gates also supports my position. Let’s rewind back to when Gates was a college student at Harvard. Keep in mind, Bill Gates was hardly a hard-luck case. His father was a prominent and wealthy lawyer, his mother served on the board of a bank, and his grandfather was the President of a bank. He attended an exclusive and expensive prep school that just happened to have access to a computer, back in the days when such access was almost unheard of. Hence, he had ample opportunity to hone his skills in software development back when almost nobody else had that kind of opportunity. If he hadn’t been born rich, he wouldn’t have had any of these opportunities. But did Harvard punish him for that with harder grading?

In other words, I am still mystified as to why it is so important to compensate for one source of supposed unfairness (the differential in salary amongst majors) when other sources of unfairness seem to be far more salient (such as the fact that some people are born into wealthy families). Even if Bill Gates had ended up majoring in humanities, which doesn’t pay much, the fact is, he has rich parents. He could probably always get money from them. He would surely know that he has a large inheritance coming to him someday. He could probably also get a high paying job through his family connections. That’s not fair: other people don’t have that.

On the topic of marketable skills that can be learned outside of the classroom. I would argue that learning to program outside of the classroom is arguably harder than learning to program inside the classroom. You need to be much more self-motivated and organized. You need to find out exactly what you need to learn, what’s marketable, and even then, you’ll probably still have a harder time getting a job than someone with a degree from Berkeley. Even you have to admit someone going into the computer industry without even a bachelor’s will have a hard time getting a job. Someone who learns software programming skills outside the classroom face a whole new set of challenges, and I definitely think it’s tougher to self-study and get a job that way than to breeze through university as an AS major. That’s why AS majors aren’t compensated as much. Greater difficulty of career path -> better compensation. Of course this isn’t true in all cases, but I think there’s a correlation there.

Actually, I would argue that it is actually easier to learn computer skills on your own than to get an A.S. degree in Berkeley. Keep in mind, to do the latter, you actually have to get into Berkeley, and most people can’t do that. Getting into Berkeley requires hard work in high school. On the other hand, anybody can pick up computer skills in their spare time. Somebody who didn’t even graduate from high school can do it. I agree with you that that requires self-motivation, but frankly, I doubt that it’s any more self-motivation than what it takes to do well enough in high school to get into Berkeley. After all, that too requires that you do lots of things that you don’t really want to do. {For example, I remember not really wanting to read Shakespeare and Chaucer in high school. But I did it.}

The beauty of what I deem the ‘computer techie’ route is that you can get a job fairly quickly. For example, I am convinced that if you spend the summer after high school learning basic IT and Web design skills, you can get a tech job. Granted, the pay will be quite low. But it will still be a tech job. It’s better than flipping burgers. With that job, you can then learn more skills and then hopscotch to better jobs. After 4 years of doing that (which is the time that you would have spent in college), you will be paid quite well - easily more than somebody with a humanities degree from Berkeley. So, if you’re lacking self-motivation, I would argue that that financial filip of that techie job is a strong motivating factor. Compare that to reading Chaucer. Exactly what was the motivation to do that? Nobody is going to hire you because you can deconstruct the Canterbury Tales.

I think you greatly overestimate the difficulties of developing techie skills. Either that, or you underestimate the capabilities of the students at Berkeley. Come on - a guy is good enough to get into Berkeley, but can’t figure out what the marketable techie skills are, and learn them? Really? Trust me, these skills are really not that hard to learn. Go to your local bookstore, go to the computer section, and just flip through some of those techie books, i.e. those manuals on Java programming or Cisco routers or whatnot. They’re not that hard. Come on, if you were good enough to get into Berkeley, you were at least in the top 12.5% of all California high school graduates - probably in the top 4% - yet you’re unable to understand these techie books? Come on.

Well, first off, I would argue that even a GPA in the low 2’s in EECS is itself a rather high academic expectation, as plenty of EECS students can’t even do that.

But more to the point, what you seem to be saying is that Berkeley (undergrad) simply needs to be more selective, i.e. closer to the selectivity of the graduate programs. On that note, I have always agreed with you.

Even more poignantly, there’s a difference between graduate students and graduate classes, and the grading has to do with the graduate classes. In other words, you are implicitly confirming one major Berkeley backdoor that I have always agreed exists: undergrads should take grad courses, especially the seminars, if they want to boost their grades, because those classes tend to be highly grade inflated. On the other hand, graduate students should stay far away from undergrad courses, especially any weeders. I will always remember my former ChemE TA for one of my weeders telling me that she herself might have been weeded out if she had taken the class under the grading scheme that was used.

But even so, I would dispute your basic assumptions. Sure, there are high expectations for somebody pursuing a PhD, and the bar is high: regarding research. Just passing a bunch of classes won’t earn you a PhD. You actually have to write a strong dissertation, and this is very difficult. But this doesn’t explain why the grad school courses have to be grade inflated (which they are). And certainly, there is no differential in grading between grad-level engineering courses and grad-level humanities courses. Frankly, they’re both equally inflated.

And I completely disagree. Grades should be a reflection of how well you know the material, perhaps relative to how well others in the same class knew the material. Nothing more.

Like I said, a tall and handsome guy is probably going to have a more enjoyable and successful life than I will. He’s going to enjoy greater success with women, he’s probably going to be a more convincing public speaker, he’s going to probably be a more effective and charismatic leader - in short, he is going to be able to cajole more people into doing what he wants them to do than I will, just because he’s tall and handsome and I’m not. That’s not fair. But that doesn’t mean that we should then give him lower grades. If he performs well, then he should get good grades.

The real question seems to boil down to: what is the purpose of grades? I believe they should simply be measurements of your performance. You seem to be arguing that grades should be instruments of social policy to correct a specific ‘injustice’ (but not any other injustices). All I would say to that is that if you really insist on conducting social policy, you should simply do so explicitly. You should propose giving the humanities students a cash grant to compensate them for the supposed ‘injustice’ of being in an unremunerative major. At least that would be the intellectually honest thing to do. Don’t try to encapsulate social policy into grades.

mathboy98 · February 4, 2009, 1:47pm

“The real question seems to boil down to: what is the purpose of grades? I believe they should simply be measurements of your performance. You seem to be arguing that grades should be instruments of social policy to correct a specific ‘injustice’ (but not any other injustices).”

Yeah, it really seems this is the question. Perhaps it would be beneficial to look at pros and cons of the different ways to think about grading.

The only pro I see to grading the majors with supposedly worse career prospects easier is that those majors get to go out of college having done less work, which may be “fairer” to them. It is clear that the system in place today does NOT function to compensate for relatively poor financial prospects upon graduation [in fact, the trend is: practical majors are explicitly more likely to be lucrative on average than theoretical ones…and a theoretical major can easily be as hard as or harder than a practical one]. So I’m going to assume from here on out, unless someone explains otherwise, that vicissitudes is not supporting the current system, but rather one which would truly let harsher grading be correlated with lucrative career prospects. And that Sakky is supporting a system which lets grading be a measure of how well one learns the material – I’d say in engineering AND in easy majors, of course, this is not generally the case [my friend often says, he basically knew the material in CS 61C as a young kid, and has done EECS type stuff for life, but 61C will test students on all the exceptions and weird nuances which are relatively unlikely to be useful probably just to make it harder…not to reflect depth of understanding necessarily…and obviously the easier majors are fine with lack of understanding passing by].

I would agree very much that it’s best not to let students who cannot make it in. I’m not sure if a school like Stanford does this very well, though…given its admissions system is very holistic, and if someone randomly decides to be a CS major, it’s not that he/she is really fit to handle the rigors [most people I know who go to Stanford could, unless I were overly optimistic, definitely not handle its CS major]. Perhaps the difference is that one can still make it through their program, and may flunk out of Berkeley’s. But yes, the ideal situation is that most of the students at these schools can actually handle their majors. I think there’s a LONG way to go in terms of ensuring this.

“But more to the point, what you seem to be saying is that Berkeley (undergrad) simply needs to be more selective, i.e. closer to the selectivity of the graduate programs. On that note, I have always agreed with you.”

Yeah seriously…the grad students I talk to are so incredibly intellectually up there. It doesn’t even matter if their classes aren’t brutal weeders…the kind of work they do is so much more up there, and most of my cohorts just wouldn’t be able to do it. The policy of being selective from the start, and forming a class of people capable of handling the material even benefits the top students, given they can focus on learning cutting edge stuff, rather than beating curves.

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Now, getting to the main topic, there seem to be very few pros I can see with making physics graded way easier than engineering because the engineer is likelier to have good career prospects, which is what vicissitudes seems to be suggesting. I mean, physics majors often have to apply to grad school! So do English, math, history majors [all relatively impractical majors, perhaps math being the least so]. I think providing some degree of assessment of how the student did to grad schools is important. Else, grad schools will either use a flawed GPA measure or discard GPA as a measure entirely. The ease of getting good scores in AP courses, for instance, seems to be one of the major flaws of the high school system…too easy to get an A in calculus BC, and get a 5 on the AP exam = bad measure of whether kids really understand math, and worse measures of admitting students. Is it really worth sacrificing the integrity of grading entirely for the sake of making a physics major feel better about his engineering friend making more money than he does? I’d like to hear this argument.

sakky · February 6, 2009, 5:57am

My other major objection to vicissitudes (and Tax Bear’s) argument for GPA compensation is that, fundamentally, it would be a distortion of the price signal and therefore of an efficient market. While I’m not a free market ideologue, I do believe that the economy fundamentally benefits from clear price signals. Let’s face it - certain majors are simply more demanded by the economy than are others. Right now, the nation’s economy needs more graduates of technical majors such as engineering and computer science than it does graduates of creampuff majors - a economic reality that has been remarked upon time and time again by numerous public policy experts. The differing salary signals therefore comprise a Hayek-style economic rationing system that serves to encourage more students to study technology and fewer to study humanities.

By the same token, a spike in the demand for wheat will boost its price, which therefore serves as a signal to farmers to produce more wheat. The consumers of wheat therefore don’t have to personally tell the farmers to do anything: the necessary information is transmitted through the price signal, and farmers will then, because of the incentive of higher prices, naturally produce more wheat to meet the extra demand. Markets therefore serve as efficient means of transmitting information about scarcity amongst market participants to produce/consume more or less, depending on the price, such that the market will find an efficient clearing price that balances supply and demand.

The problem comes when something serves to distort that signal, such as a mechanism to provide ‘GPA compensation’ for those majors that supposedly pay “too low”. That serves to reduce the overall inefficiency of the market by discouraging the production of the more highly demanded good (i.e. the EECS graduate) and encouraging the production of the less demanded good (i.e. the graduate of the creampuff majors). Slicmlic2001 said it himself: he might have been an EECS major were it not for the fact that he wanted to protect his GPA. I’m sure that a lot of other people concluded the same. The result is then that Berkeley does not produce as many engineering graduates and produces too many graduates of creampuff majors than as it should, given the demand.

To continue the farmer analogy: let’s say that farmers can choose to plant either wheat or barley. If the people of the world decide to consume more wheat and less barley, then the prices of each should naturally shift to reflect those changes in demand, and then the farmers will then adjust his production accordingly according to those price signals. But if an outside force chooses to interfere with those signals - perhaps by providing a subsidy for barley because its price is “unfairly low”, or that wheat makers make “too much money” - then farmers will produce insufficient wheat to meet market demand and will produce extra barley that nobody really wants. {It is for precisely this reason that practically all economists vehemently oppose farm subsidies, because they encourage inefficient production.}

Berkeley is a public university, and - let’s face it - one major political justification for state taxpayer support of any public university is its enhancement of the local economy via the production of trained graduates. After all, how else will you obtain the political support of those taxpayers in the state whose kids can’t or don’t want to get into Berkeley, or who don’t even have kids at all? Yet, for that logic to make sense, it is vital that Berkeley produces those types of graduates that the market actually demands, which requires that students receive clear price signals.

mathboy98 · February 6, 2009, 1:56pm

Interesting above. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way.

is it hard to graduate from berkeley?

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