is it hard to graduate from berkeley?

mathboy98 · February 8, 2009, 7:25pm

“What I would proffer is for those engineering students who do want to pursue grad school to take an additional optional sequence of courses, something like an ‘honors’ sequence’, that is highly rigorous. But that sequence would be optional. Those students who don’t care about grad school and just want to get a job would not have to take this sequence. You shouldn’t impose “grad-school-prep” rigor on those who don’t care about grad school anyway.”

I am very, very greatly in favor of such honors sequences. They exist in the mathematics department for at least a few courses, and same in the physics department. Unfortunately, engineering seems to believe all their courses can be uniform in difficulty, or can’t afford to offer such distinctions.

Nevertheless Sakky, while lowering the grade deflation to the level of other schools, and offering cushions like MIT does to its first year students is great, I still maintain “a reasonable level” in the sense that your GPA should mean something to grad schools. See, in the end neither your nor my proposal can do it all – if one reduces the grading standards way too much [say, considerably easier than Stanford’s engineering], we’re invalidating GPA as a consideration for grad school. If engineering GPA’s are too low for law school, then we’re screwing those students over. A balance seems crucial.

I agree right now, Berkeley’s policy isn’t ideal for its students though, since a school like Stanford maintains somewhat more manageable grading standards in engineering, and STILL is hard and rigorous enough that students applying to grad schools are respected. That’s a good balance.

I am all in favor of not letting students into engineering who can’t make it at Berkeley as well, and then maintaining better grading standards for those who do make it. The guys who don’t make it here could at least head somewhere else, not flunk out, and have jobs.

mathboy98 · February 8, 2009, 7:50pm

I.e., I am fine with anything as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of Berkeley’s reputation as a top school for engineering academics [or for math, physics, etc…]. If students can get engineering degrees elsewhere and make it, I suggest not admitting them to Berkeley engineering in the first place, and then maintaining a balance like some other schools do.

I think this is noncontroversial enough. I am in no way suggesting that rampant grade deflation is good for grad school prep. A balance is all I ask for.

sakky · February 8, 2009, 7:56pm

But they can afford to offer such distinctions, and in fact are doing so right now…through their graduate courses. Berkeley’s graduate engineering courses offer very high theoretical content and hence by definition are suitable for those who are looking to become future researchers and academics. All Berkeley has to do is open those courses to that subset of advanced undergraduates who know they want to go to grad school. That way, Berkeley has to create no extra courses. It just has to offer the same courses that it offers now anyway.

Furthermore, those engineering students who don’t care about grad school don’t have to take these courses. Instead, they can learn only those topics that are necessary to know to do the job, and frankly, much of the content of the Berkeley engineering curriculum are comprised of topics that you don’t really need to know. For example, to this very day, I still don’t understand what the heck the Maxwell Relations of chemical thermodynamics actually mean in a real world context, nor have I ever found a single practicing engineer who does.

[Maxwell</a> relations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_relations]Maxwell”>Maxwell relations - Wikipedia)

In short, you can take all of the heavy theoretical material that real-world engineers never really use and just shift them to the graduate courses. Those students who actually care about the high-end theory can choose to learn it through those courses. Those students who just want to get jobs don’t need to be bothered and can just learn whatever is necessary to do the job. Like I said before, the highly rigorous and theoretical content of the Berkeley engineering programs don’t seem to significantly benefit the students on the market, as they don’t earn much more than the national engineering average, controlling for geography. That’s a strong indication that you don’t really need to know that stuff in order to handle the job.

Nevertheless Sakky, while lowering the grade deflation to the level of other schools, and offering cushions like MIT does to its first year students is great, I still maintain “a reasonable level” in the sense that your GPA should mean something to grad schools. See, in the end neither your nor my proposal can do it all – if one reduces the grading standards way too much [say, considerably easier than Stanford’s engineering], we’re invalidating GPA as a consideration for grad school. If engineering GPA’s are too low for law school, then we’re screwing those students over. A balance seems crucial.

I agree right now, Berkeley’s policy isn’t ideal for its students though, since a school like Stanford maintains somewhat more manageable grading standards in engineering, and STILL is hard and rigorous enough that students applying to grad schools are respected. That’s a good balance.

Uh, let me clue you into grad school admissions, by which I presume that you mean PhD admissions. The fact is, GPA is actually not that important. It is perhaps 3rd on the hierarchy of importance. What’s really important are your research projects and your letters of recommendation (which often times themselves stem from your research projects). If you have a good research project and strong letters of recommendation, then you’re going to get into a top grad school provided your GPA isn’t horrible. On the other hand, a top GPA but poor LOR’s and research (or no research at all) probably won’t get you into any top program. After all, PhD programs are hardly about grades. Unless you fail, nobody cares about grades when you’re in a PhD program. Nobody really cares about how you do in the classroom. What really matters is your research. Getting a publication in a top journal means far more than all of the A grades in the world.

Hence, your contention that we might invalidate GPA as a consideration for grad school is already happening: right now, grad school adcoms don’t really care all that much about your GPA. Hence, I don’t think we’re really losing very much anyway.

Besides, think of it this way. I think we can all agree that the Berkeley humanities and socsci majors tend to be graded rather leniently. Yet the fact remains that a significant chunk of those students will be admitted to the top PhD programs, despite the fact that their GPA’s have been similarly invalidated as a signal of quality to grad schools. What that means is that those grad programs have figured out ways to admit people without relying on GPA (as even the poor students will probably have very good GPA’s). If those grad programs can do that, why can’t engineering grad programs do the same?

sakky · February 8, 2009, 7:58pm

Again, Berkeley has a stellar brand name as a top school for the humanities/soc-sciences, despite the fact that the their courses tend to be graded leniently. That begs the question: if those departments can get away with that, why can’t the engineering departments?

As a case in point, I think there is little dispute that Berkeley’s psychology undergrad program is graded quite easily (at least, relative to engineering). Let’s be honest - there are a lot of psychology students who don’t know much, don’t study much, don’t care, yet get high GPA’s anyway. Nevertheless the psych department is the #2 ranked psych department in the country - a higher ranking than many of Berkeley’s engineering departments.

mathboy98 · February 8, 2009, 9:01pm

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Uh, let me clue you into grad school admissions, by which I presume that you mean PhD admissions. The fact is, GPA is actually not that important. It is perhaps 3rd on the hierarchy of importance. What’s really important are your research projects and your letters of recommendation (which often times themselves stem from your research projects). If you have a good research project and strong letters of recommendation, then you’re going to get into a top grad school provided your GPA isn’t horrible. On the other hand, a top GPA but poor LOR’s and research (or no research at all) probably won’t get you into any top program. After all, PhD programs are hardly about grades. Unless you fail, nobody cares about grades when you’re in a PhD program. Nobody really cares about how you do in the classroom. What really matters is your research. Getting a publication in a top journal means far more than all of the A grades in the world.

Hence, your contention that we might invalidate GPA as a consideration for grad school is already happening: right now, grad school adcoms don’t really care all that much about your GPA. Hence, I don’t think we’re really losing very much anyway."

I don’t know, this sounds fishy to me. I don’t know as much about the engineering process perhaps, but I at least know about the mathematics process in a very detailed way, and grades there are really important. Perhaps the difference is that you cannot really do pure math research as an undergrad, unless it is “Combinatorial + Probabilistic A, B, or C” which doesn’t really count anyway.

Nevertheless, I have a hard time believing that getting a good GPA from a reputed school like Berkeley [or Stanford, or MIT] doesn’t have a certain significant value. I understand very well that Ph.D. programs are not about grades themselves, and yet a huge part of what an undergraduate does is take classes + learn material.

I suggest that we allow GPA to remain an indicator of some achievement. I made a very reasonable contention, which is for a balance, and am favoring that a university like Stanford doesn’t kill its undergrads’ grades quite as much [perhaps not more than necessary]. Nevertheless, a good GPA from Stanford engineering still MEANS SOMETHING.
I’m not sure how accurate it is that GPA is so worthless in grad school admissions that we no longer even care about it, and that bad grades only serve to hurt prospective law school applicants. If this is really true, fine. I know it’s not true in the math department. I’ll have to speak with Berkeley’s professors who actually are involved in the selection process to see how much they value GPA.

I am asking for a balance, and I think you have to give me a pretty good reason why we should just inflate grades to high heaven, arguably even beyond what Stanford does [which was the barometer I gave in my last post]. It seems to me Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT all value grades to some extent in their undergrad programs, and of course some make it harder than others.

mathboy98 · February 8, 2009, 9:08pm

“If those grad programs can do that, why can’t engineering grad programs do the same?”

They can…but WHY would they? I am only saying we should let grades be an indicator of knowledge of the material. If we implement hooks like MIT’s free pass test run in engineering and reduce rampant grade deflation, and kill off Berkeley’s “engineering trap” as you call it, for the students doing badly, WHY implement even more inflation? Even Stanford makes its classes hard enough that grades actually mean something. It just doesn’t flunk its students out.

The clear advantage to maintaining the integrity of grades is that schools can look at the grades and actually make something of them. Humanities grad programs may not have that luxury…so? I say to go along with YOUR PREVIOUS plan of making the humanities courses graded so grades mean something. Not grading on a brutal curve to flunk kids out…just grading so that being an A student means something.

mathboy98 · February 8, 2009, 9:16pm

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In short, you can take all of the heavy theoretical material that real-world engineers never really use and just shift them to the graduate courses. Those students who actually care about the high-end theory can choose to learn it through those courses. Those students who just want to get jobs don’t need to be bothered and can just learn whatever is necessary to do the job. Like I said before, the highly rigorous and theoretical content of the Berkeley engineering programs don’t seem to significantly benefit the students on the market, as they don’t earn much more than the national engineering average, controlling for geography. That’s a strong indication that you don’t really need to know that stuff in order to handle the job."

OK, I already told you, I’m in favor of there being honors sequences. They don’t offer 'em…what do I do? If someone really doesn’t want to take more than the courses required for a good job, I say A. Don’t go to Berkeley engineering, you can get a good job from elsewhere [just like Harvey Mudd ain’t for everyone, neither is Berkeley], and B. Major in a creampuff at Berkeley, and just sign up for some CS courses. I know someone doing a version of this, except instead of a creampuff, he’s doing math. And he’s already doing much more in terms of practical job work than most EECS majors do as undergrads.

The EECS major at Berkeley is of a certain academic caliber, and no reason in my head to reduce that caliber when undergrads could go elsewhere and get the skills to get good jobs. Leave Berkeley, Stanford and MIT engineering as OPTIONS for those who want it. Teach all the hard stuff. Because quite a few people actually want that stuff. Those who won’t don’t have to come here, nobody is forcing 'em. You’ve many times on several threads told people not to go to Berkeley, and I’ve backed you up every time when you said those guys probably would be better off in an easier school.

FB_lalaland · February 8, 2009, 10:52pm

How hard is it to get a 3.5 GPA+ in first year if I am taking general chem, possibly organic chem, general bio, Calculus, and academic writing classes?

mathboy98 · February 8, 2009, 11:04pm

Harder if you take O-Chem than not, of course. I mean, see it depends on what your strengths are, and how aware you are of the extent A. your strengths match up against others around you, B. how good of a test-taker you are – you can be great at calculus, and others may test better than you.

I think it’s very doable to get straight A’s in those classes if you really get what you’re doing, but I’d not take it with a professor who gives very bad grades for the sake of doing so.

sakky · February 9, 2009, 12:43am

Uh, sure you can do pure math research as an undergrad. Why not? There are math undergrads who have proven some (minor) theorem. Or who have collaborated on a math proof with professors as part of an active research study. Or otherwise contribute to the mathematics literature In fact, that’s the whole point of both the Math 199 independent study designation and the Math 196 thesis designation (for those in the honors program). Why even have these course designations at all if nobody ever uses them?

Please do so. In particular, you should ask whether somebody with an unimpressive GPA but who has stellar LOR’s and demonstrated research potential will be chosen over somebody with a stellar GPA but unimpressive LOR’s and research potential. I am quite certain that they will take the former. It won’t even be a close call.

I could equally ask the same question about the humanities and soc-sci majors that you’re asking of me: why did they implement so much inflation? Yet the question is irrelevant, because they did it, whether we like it or not.

It all gets back to my basic question: why exactly should the grading in hum/socsci be so much easier than in the technical majors? If easy grading is fine for the former, then it should be equally fine for the latter. Like I said, if the engineers should be subject to harsh grading, then all of the majors should be subject to the same harsh grading. Otherwise, don’t subject the engineers. I see no reason for differential grading policies. I see no reason for the tech majors to be singled out.

So let me turn the question around - why exactly should the tech majors be graded harder than the nontech majors?

mathboy98 · February 9, 2009, 1:00am

“Uh, sure you can do pure math research as an undergrad. Why not? There are math undergrads who have proven some (minor) theorem. Or who have collaborated on a math proof with professors as part of an active research study. Or otherwise contribute to the mathematics literature In fact, that’s the whole point of both the Math 199 independent study designation and the Math 196 thesis designation (for those in the honors program). Why even have these course designations at all if nobody ever uses them?”

Well, I think you assume too quickly that I don’t know about these things. I did a Math 199 as a freshman, and am in both an undergraduate and graduate reading course this year [the latter being even less common]. I am certainly aware of the extent to which undergrads can accomplish pure math research, and it generally is limited to certain topics. Mainstream, abstract math is very hard to get into without courses that maybe 1-2 undergraduates per year at Berkeley even attempt as starting points. Hence, math Ph.D. programs will look significantly at how much math you learned more favorably than feeble attempts to prove theorems.

I have a hard time believing that most students getting into top graduate schools in engineering come in without both stellar GPA’s and stellar work outside of classes…even Stanford doesn’t award its entire class A’s in engineering, I’m certain, as it still sees value to maintaining some integrity of the grading standards. I’m not asking for more than that.

“It all gets back to my basic question: why exactly should the grading in hum/socsci be so much easier than in the technical majors?”

Well, as I said, I was agreeing with you when you said it’s ridiculous how easily some of these majors scrape by. You don’t want those guys to go to law school happily while some engineering fellow fries without having a chance, right? There are alternate solutions, like not allowing flaky majors to be so flaky. Certainly better than giving out A’s to every engineering student and making grades in engineering worth utterly nothing to those who evaluate them. If getting an A in American studies means nothing, I see it a more direct approach to the problem to correct American studies than to try to give everyone A’s in engineering [though I, as always, agree the current situation with engineering is too severe]. We’re both talking about theoretical changes, so might as well agree on the best one, and I think even you said earlier that you’d be in favor of humanities majors not being way easier than tech majors – I even asked then whether you think maybe there isn’t as clear a distinction between good and bad humanities work, and you, I think, agreed with my gut response to my own question, which is that there really is distinction, and the so-called “objective” grading measures in engineering are far from objective, depending on the random selection of exam questions + grading curve settings.

mathboy98 · February 9, 2009, 1:02am

Plus, I believe even for law school, those majors who are super flaky probably will get creamed by the LSAT. I don’t think you can be THAT stupid and beat the engineer. Though I can agree the engineers are at a certain disadvantage that I wish they weren’t at.

mathboy98 · February 9, 2009, 1:08am

“Please do so. In particular, you should ask whether somebody with an unimpressive GPA but who has stellar LOR’s and demonstrated research potential will be chosen over somebody with a stellar GPA but unimpressive LOR’s and research potential. I am quite certain that they will take the former. It won’t even be a close call.”

Well, I don’t have to ask them to agree with this statement. My point, though, is that the very top schools seem to require both on average. A large part of an undergrad’s time is spent taking advanced courses. Part of the measure of how prepared an undergrad is for grad school is how much he LEARNED. I mean, sure you can do research as a freshman or sophomore…but the more you learn, the better the potential for research to an extent. You can be great at classes but not be interested in research, sure, but I think both your effort at learning material + attempts at research convey two very different things, both important factors.

While I think a CS major is more likely to get his major on a paper of some significance than a math major is, the bottom line is that there’s a ton of stuff to learn before you can think at the level of the top grad students, and doing well at classes that’re graded with SOME integrity actually says something.

sakky · February 9, 2009, 3:15am

OK, I already told you, I’m in favor of there being honors sequences. They don’t offer 'em…what do I do? If someone really doesn’t want to take more than the courses required for a good job, I say A. Don’t go to Berkeley engineering, you can get a good job from elsewhere [just like Harvey Mudd ain’t for everyone, neither is Berkeley], and B. Major in a creampuff at Berkeley, and just sign up for some CS courses. I know someone doing a version of this, except instead of a creampuff, he’s doing math. And he’s already doing much more in terms of practical job work than most EECS majors do as undergrads.

The EECS major at Berkeley is of a certain academic caliber, and no reason in my head to reduce that caliber when undergrads could go elsewhere and get the skills to get good jobs. Leave Berkeley, Stanford and MIT engineering as OPTIONS for those who want it. Teach all the hard stuff. Because quite a few people actually want that stuff. Those who won’t don’t have to come here, nobody is forcing 'em. You’ve many times on several threads told people not to go to Berkeley, and I’ve backed you up every time when you said those guys probably would be better off in an easier school.

The main practical issue is simple: much as I would like to believe otherwise, the fact is, I know I won’t be able to convince most people. Most people don’t read CC. And even if they did, most people won’t listen to me. Let’s face it. Most 18 year old kids who got into Berkeley are overconfident. Heck, why wouldn’t they be? If they got into Berkeley, that means that they’ve done well in high school. They’ve probably never felt any academic failure before in their lives. So even if I was to prove to them the statistical facts that demonstrate the some of them will fail, they are all going to think that it’s not going to happen to them. Hence, even if we convincingly told them that some of them may be better off at a lower UC or a CalState, come on, how many 18 year old kids are really going to listen to us and turn down a school with the brand name of Berkeley? They will continue to come, major in a technical discipline, and many will perform poorly.

I also have to take exception to your notion that Berkeley doesn’t offer “honors” sequences in the disciplines in question. Like I said, actually, they do. They offer graduate courses, which are de-facto “honors” sequences; Berkeley can therefore offer those graduate courses as the mechanism for undergrads to prove their mettle. {Frankly, any undergrad who is seriously thinking about graduate school should already be seriously considering graduate courses anyway.} Those who do well within those graduate courses now have a highly reliable signal to present to PhD adcoms, regardless of whatever information the undergraduate grades may fail to convey. What that also means is that those undergrads who have no interest in grad school can simply choose not to take those grad courses.

Look, the fact of the matter is, an undergrad major is simply a course of study that you choose for 4 years of your young adulthood. It isn’t your life, nor should it be. As I’m sure you know, lots of engineering students won’t actually take jobs in engineering. {Which is hardly surprising compared to the fact that most students in any major won’t actually take jobs in that major.} Hence, I don’t see why it is so controversial for somebody to want to come to Berkeley, study engineering for 4 years, but still retain maximum flexibility as to whatever else he wants to do with the rest of his life. If he decides he wants to go to law school or med school, he should be rendered fully competitive for those options. If he decides he wants to be an investment banker or management consultant - two career fields that tend to use GPA as initial screens - he should be allowed to do that. Simply choosing engineering shouldn’t render such a student less competitive (through GPA deflation) for any other career path that he may choose.

sakky · February 9, 2009, 3:30am

Like I’ve been saying: we already have this option. You want to really prove via a class that you have the wherewithal to handle a math grad program? Fine. Then take Math 204. Take Math 205. Take Math 222. Take Math 250. Why not? The prereqs for these courses are undergrad (upper division) math courses. Do well in those courses and you will present incontrovertibly strong proof that you have the ability to handle a top flight math graduate program, for after all, those are the courses that the current Berkeley math grad students take.

That option provides the further benefit of academic recovery. Who really cares if you performed poorly in Math 185 if you performed smashingly well in 205? Maybe you just didn’t understand 185, but you clearly recovered for 205.

The greatest advantage is that it allows people to major in math as an intellectual curiosity while still preserving the full range of career choices if they don’t actually intend to go to math grad school. Those people can simply choose not to take grad math courses.

mathboy98 · February 9, 2009, 11:48am

The grad courses are certainly a great option, I completely agree, and I think plenty of the students serious about grad school do take them. Nevertheless, I don’t think most students are in the position to just forget about undergraduate courses and take graduate courses very early on. The so-called top graduating math senior last year [accepted to the likes of Princeton and MIT for grad school] was in fact a CS major for 2 years, and started off at Math 53. Lots of people start ahead of him…and don’t necessarily make it where he did. I believe grad schools like to see some years of consistent effort, at least starting sophomore year, and leaving undergrads to just take grad courses instead seems to limit things quite a bit to me. You cannot get to a lot of the grad topics very late – i.e., get a broad foundation in mathematics courses. for instance, the 202 and 250 sequences are exclusively algebra and analysis. Anyone who took Eisenbud’s 250A knows it’s probably harder to get an A in than virtually any undergraduate engineering course…the guy talks about stuff WAY over the level of 250A, and flunks out basically 99% of his undergrads. All the undergrads I know who took honors courses like H110 and up with me dropped that course. Where are their plans now? They have at most 202A as an option at this stage, and these guys are juniors. The prerequisites to most grad courses are genuinely a solid undergrad foundation – they require much more knowledge than the course catalogs suggest. “Just take grad courses” is a lot easier than it sounds…the only such courses a pure math major likely will consider are 202 and 250, and those two on one’s schedule alone preclude one from doing very much else.

A similar, if not more pressing issue applies to, say CS grad courses. My friend said: there are basically no problem sets in many of them! They’re all about doing research work and writing papers at the end…and most of the grad students know way more than the prerequisite material, and the professor kind of just goes with that. Perhaps you believe one can just start researching in a CS theory grad course early on, but it’s genuinely quite counter-productive before you get some solid foundation in courses like CS 170, CS 172, etc. And one has to spend a lot of time doing that! Which means, while I don’t believe in grade DEFLATION, I think getting a good grade in those courses should mean something.

If anyone could stroll into Math 202 and 250, or CS 27- and find it productive or manageable, fine. But the reality is these are NOT honors courses [i.e. more theoretical, rigorous versions of existing coursework]. They’re very much not productive for people to take until they receive rather solid foundations in math, and will generally constitute only the latest part of someone’s education. Jumping into CS 276 or whatever at an early stage really isn’t productive at all.

This is part of the reason Harvard’s undergrad math program is so amazing. They have BOTH a huge, incomparably awesome selection of undergrad and grad courses, and their undergrad selection seems to beat that of Berkeley. Students can get a productive foundation before they go on.

“ence, I don’t see why it is so controversial for somebody to want to come to Berkeley, study engineering for 4 years, but still retain maximum flexibility as to whatever else he wants to do with the rest of his life.”

This is not controversial. I have supported your general view on this thread for the longest time now, and even elsewhere. What I’m explaining here is just that an undergrad spends a LOT of time in classes to get a foundation. That’s what undergrad education partially is. Research is primarily a grad thing, even for very smart undergrads…yes you can do something as undergrads, but it is more productive, even according to the professors I’ve spoken to, to learn something rather than overshoot yourself trying to prove a theorem with no visible technical background. So while I don’t want to kill undergrads’ grades, I think it’s fair to make them work hard for them as engineers, mathematicians, physicists…AND humanities majors. Work hard to get a good grade, and head to law school. Don’t trap engineers – if they want to switch out, let them. I see the most direct solution is not to give everyone A’s, but to allow maximum flexibility, as you say, to switch among majors, and to have reasonable grading standards in their majors, which, while reflective of their efforts, need not be the end-all.

peptea · February 10, 2009, 2:24am

interesting thread. cal alum here.

to answer the original question, it’s not hard to graduate from berkeley. all it takes a 2.0. now, is it hard to graduate with a GOOD gpa? that depends on your major, how intelligent you are, and how hard you work. one person may graduate with a 4.0 in EECS with no sweat while another may graduate with a 2.7 in sociology despite a good effort (believe it or not, people like this do exist even at colleges like uc berkeley).

i admit that i was initially one of those aimless, passionless, and decidedly mediocre students who got into cal by luck. i majored in a social science and took easy cheesy classes my first few years at cal before i made a 180 change and started taking some bio/chem/physics courses for a health career (NOT premed, far from it). while i didnt get A’s in those classes (B = Best grade i could get), i got a greater feeling of satisfaction because i was giving it my all and the courses were forcing me to embrace challenge. at the same time, i do think cal can take its curving grades bullshyt too far, which means students who should have a good chance getting into grad school and doing well there have an uphill battle if one too many nasty curves screw them over (i am mostly talking about people who are going to grad school for math/technical & health professional fields). in that sense, i think a lot of cal students who didnt too well and cant get into grad schools (or schools of their choice) might have been better off going to a ‘lesser’ school that may have slightly easier grading and more opportunities. the school name can only get you so far. even if you dont want to acknowledge it, you’ll find that out eventually when you graduate. i know plenty of people who went to lesser-known schools with whatever reputations, but they still were able to succeed because they have connections, a good personality, and the smarts. going to cal won’t make you suddenly attain all those positive attributes.

would i still have gone to cal knowing what i do now? yes, i would have. despite its faults i still loved berkeley. the campus has a vibe you cant find anywhere else (and ive checked out stanford, most other UC’s, and some ivy leagues). GO BEARS!

sakky · February 10, 2009, 10:32pm

Couple that with the fact that Harvard undergrads have full access to the MIT course catalog through cross-reg (and vice versa). Berkeley undergrads have no such comparable option.

Yet the fact is, PhD programs in the easier undergrad majors (i.e. psychology) are still able to figure out how to admit the best students despite not having a reliable GPA signal. Why are they able to do it, but the technical departments can’t? Do they know something that the tech departments do not?

vicissitudes · February 11, 2009, 1:23am

Speaking of which, why DON’T Berkeley have something comparable with Stanford?

mathboy98 · February 11, 2009, 2:34am

“Couple that with the fact that Harvard undergrads have full access to the MIT course catalog through cross-reg (and vice versa). Berkeley undergrads have no such comparable option.”

Well, so the point here was that while those at the highest level of math have it as swell at Berkeley really as anywhere, at the stage of developing foundations, there’s a disadvantage. Some students like me sidestepped this because we were ahead coming into math, but not every student is. This is why my point that you can’t just substitute a grad program for an undergrad program is so important here. Berkeley has a good course offering for math undergrads, but not the most vast one out there for sure.

I understand the humanities departments sidestep it, supposedly…I am far from an expert on the selection process there, but I definitely know something about it for the math and engineering realm, and have fairly logical reasons that maintaining some GPA integrity [better than many of the humanities, etc majors do] is a plus…at least get students to work for their A’s. Perhaps the humanities departments which are really too easy [not all probably] could be served by not being so easy – I think you already wanted this, and I agree [they don’t have to become BRUTAL, but A’s and B’s should mean something…no need to give out horrible grades necessarily]. I think the only way to really sidestep requiring GPA to be a consideration in courses is not to force everyone to take grad courses [simply not practical in most cases], but to have stellar, detailed professor recommendations be a focus. I.e., have professors write about how a student was in their classes. This is, however, considerably tougher if classes are larger.

“Speaking of which, why DON’T Berkeley have something comparable with Stanford?”

You mean grading policy and stuff? I dunno, ask Sakky probably, he probably has his conjectures given he’s posted a lot on the topic. I’m interested to know as well. I think the school would benefit a ton from refinements.

is it hard to graduate from berkeley?

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