<p>Hi all! As a Cal student myself, I can definitely see Sakky’s point (I’ve read many of Sakky’s posts about this “difficulty to graduate” business) - I’m not in a major like MCB, but I do see what goes on there. It is definitely not the ideal thing to go to Cal for an overly competitive major if you’re goal is med school or so. </p>
<p>I do think, though, that entering the EECS department is a very good choice if you make an informed decision. I.e., don’t enter it because you had good grades in high school. REALISTICALLY ask yourself if you’re in general a talented problem solver, beyond the stuff they teach you in a very standard high school course. In case Sakky takes issue with my advice, I’m making the disclaimer that I’m basically agreeing with him - i.e., for the student who may have an issue graduating, it might be best to take a different road. </p>
<p>For those applying to grad school though, I think Cal has one far too amazing advantage - the faculty, and one of the top grad programs sitting right there. And if you’re wanting grad school at a place like Cal or MIT, you’d better BE prepared to get A’s in our classes anyway! It’s a really rough world out there in grad school admissions.</p>
<p>As for Sakky’s philosophy on letting students in vs. not…I guess my belief is that schools generally are very bad at approximating how well a student is suited for a given major - usually high schoolers just don’t have enough of a specialized outlook to know. So I don’t think Cal could just be more careful in its admissions! I know guys who were rejected, and were SURELY fit for EECS, but didn’t have inflated GPA’s and irrelevant AP classes. </p>
<p>What I do wish is that the competition mania could be reduced. Somehow, students need to be assessed based on what they know! I think that might happen more at other schools, and Cal may be overly competitive. </p>
<p>Oh, and whoever generalized way back that CAl students work tiny hours a day … basically is making no point whatsoever. It’s the sort of school where you really have to make your own way, and some students do it - others don’t. This, to ME is very nice, but it’s not for everyone.</p>
<p>One flaw that I see in the whole “let students switch out of engineering with a clean slate” argument is that it might encourage people to give engineering a “test run” before moving on to other things. </p>
<p>Take myself for example. I would venture to say that I’m an above-average Cal student, and that I probably could have survived in an engineering field. However, I’ve always wanted to have law school as a last resort option in case I can’t figure out anything better to do with my life. </p>
<p>Knowing how important having that fallback option was for me, I decided to play it safe and major in a less rigorous discipline. I took many courses in different departments that satisfied my intellectual thirst for how the other side lives, but I did so on a Pass/No Pass basis- thus not jeopardizing my GPA. </p>
<p>Now, had I known that I could have a test-run at EECS without hindering my law school fallback option, I probably would have taken it. I could have tried it out for a year or two to see if I liked it or not, and then gone from there. </p>
<p>However, from a policy perspective, I don’t know if this is something that the university might necessarily want to advocate. I think a better proposal would be something similar to what MIT has, which is mandating that all courses taken during the first semester are taken on a P/NP basis. That way, instead of me trying to wade through the EECS requirements for two years before realizing that I want to switch to Poli Sci, I would only have a semester to do so. Thus, valuable resources would be saved and graduation time would be shortened. If everyone took two years to try engineering before they switched to something else, you run the risk of either graduating less engineers, or increasing the average length of time for many students to graduate.</p>
<p>However, you also run the risk of people in similarly difficult non-engineering majors such as Math, Physics, and MCB- complaining that they weren’t given a similar “bailout” option, so why the special treatment for engineers?</p>
<p>“However, my question is, why is it a design feature only for the technical majors like math/science? Why don’t all the other majors also try to force people out through harsh grading? Why only tech?”</p>
<p>Perhaps an answer to this question deals with the overall importance of the discipline. Engineers need to be really good at what they do, because there are real world consequences in their occupations. If you have two-bit civil, mechanic, or electrical engineers- you’ll have buildings collapsing, software malfunctioning, etc…stuff that can cause real world damage. You see the same thing with MCB and other bio related fields…you don’t want your doctor to misdiagnose you because it could have dire consequences.</p>
<p>However, on the other hand…there is relatively less threat of damage from a Poli Sci, English, Ethnic Studies, or History major. Sure, misinterpreting political movements, novels, race relations, or history can have their dangers as well…but I think that the victims of Hurricane Katrina would appreciate better civil-engineers than authors.</p>
<p>slicmlic2001 - interesting point about the MIT policy! It’s definitely not good to wade around in a major for too long without being sure of going into it. I did a test run in EECS, planning to double with math, and decided I just wanted to study pure math. But I think I backed off before it was too late, and was taking a bunch of math anyway in my first year (when I switched). </p>
<p>Then again, might I lightly suggest that it made so tough at Berkeley might just be the university remaining steadfast on its poli be up to the [responsible??] student to manage his/her time in college better? I.e. it seems QUITE foolish to spend 2 years in EECS with less than a rather strong probability of staying in the major. The first year seems OK, because a lot of the requirements will be the same for any somewhat technical major. </p>
<p>I think part of the reason engineering iscies for the COE…reputation and all. I know the COE is quite proud of itself. Because other disciplines like pure math seem to have fairly rigorous, but not SO competitive, grading schemes. I daresay pure math is a huge intellectual challenge, where the slightest miscalculation of reasoning can lead to deep pits (OK, fine a bridge won’t collapse immediately…but bad mathematics is real dangerous if people try to apply it!!!)</p>
<p>OK laptop behaving funny…that post came a bit garbled, some words were not where they were meant to be…hope it makes some sense, else forgive me =]</p>
<p>Yeah, it probably would. So? I don’t see that as a bad thing. In fact, that’s the whole point. I think students should be encouraged to attempt difficult things, with no penalty if they don’t do well. I don’t believe that students should have to play the rational but sad ‘GPA-protection’ game, and not daring to try out interesting (but difficult) topics. </p>
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<p>The major problem with transferring the MIT system to Berkeley is that many of Berkeley’s weeders occur rather late in the process. For example, CS 150 is a harsh weeder, and I rather doubt that many first-semester freshmen - which is when the MIT P/NR grading system is in effect - would have the wherewithal to take that class. The prereqs of CS 150 are CS 61C and EE 40 or 42, and these are true prereqs in the sense that you really do need to know that stuff in order to be prepared for the course. </p>
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<p>Sure, that’s the risk you as a student have to take if you want to try engineering. Keep in mind that students would be free to switch away at any time. If they try out engineering for just one semester and then decide to leave, they are free to do so, without penalty. </p>
<p>I don’t see that this is a problem that can be fixed, for your example is no different from a student trying out some creampuff fluff major for 2 years and then deciding he wants to switch. Either way, his graduation is likely to be delayed. Either way, you run the risk of graduating less engineers.</p>
<p>What I am proposing is that students who try out engineering and perform poorly and so decide to switch to something else should not have to be haunted by those poor engineering grades forever. But that doesn’t absolve the students from all responsibility. If they want to graduate on time, they still have to find the major that is right for them as quickly as possible, just like they would at any other school. </p>
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<p>I personally think that all majors should be given the bailout option. If you’re not going to major in a particular topic, who cares that you got poor grades in that topic? Just wipe those poor grades from their transcript. Make the option available to all majors. One nice feature would be that certain majors wouldn’t benefit from this reform because they already “protect” students’ transcripts from poor grades by not even giving out those poor grades in the first place. Hence, my reform wouldn’t help those majors, but that actually gets to my central point - it is deeply unfair that certain majors are graded easier than others. While I won’t be able to equate the differing grading standards used by different majors, I can at least ameliorate the problem of students stuck with poor grades from majors they are no longer in. </p>
<p>{Now, one could argue that perhaps an even more direct way to solve this problem is to align the grading standards used by different majors, which would ultimately mean that engineering, math, and science majors would grade easier and arts/soc-sci majors would grade harder. I support this option also, but I think that’s best left to another thread. }</p>
<p>But to your direct question: why the special treatment for engineers? Because under the current system, it is the engineers who are getting screwed the most. The math and physics majors are free to switch to a unimpacted creampuff major in L&S at any time. But the engineers don’t have that option. There are no creampuff majors in the CoE, and all of the majors in the CoE are impacted anyway. Switching to L&S means switching colleges, which is not easy to do if your GPA isn’t above a 3.0, which many engineering students have nowhere near. Hence, given their especially nasty circumstances, engineering students deserve special treatment. </p>
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<p>Come on, really? By far the most dangerous force in the world - what is responsible for perhaps a billion deaths in the last century alone - is politics. How many people have died in the name of a political ideology? How many Chinese had to die because Mao was trying to prove the worthiness of a flawed political system? How many Cambodians had to die from Pol Pot? </p>
<p>Or take ethnic studies, frankly, one of the most dangerous topics in history if misused. How many people did Hitler kill in trying to create a homeland for his Aryan master race? Perhaps a million Rwandans were slaughtered in just a few short months because of their ethnic strife incited by intellectuals spewing hateful ethnic ideologies. To quote Sowell: “The role of soft-subject intellectuals - notably professors
and schoolteachers - in fermenting internal strife and
separatism, from the Basques in Spain to the French
in Canada, adds another set of dangers of political
instability from schooling without skills.” (p. 24, Race & Culture)</p>
<p>The point simply is that there are indeed tremendous dangers to be faced when people misunderstand the supposed “softer” subjects. Sure, if you commit a mistake in engineering, a bridge may fall down and kill people and that’s sad. But if you commit a mistake of the social sciences, a hateful and murderous ideology may be spawned. To take again the example of Mao, even the Chinese Communist Party concedes that he made egregious mistakes, and nobody today, not even the CCP, defends such programs as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.</p>
<p>Interesting, it is true that engineers do deserve a bit of special treatment there. I mean, I was fortunate enough to switch from engineering to pure mathematics out of interest, not because engineering classes were flunking me…but it was a pretty stressful switch anyway. Would’ve been really bad if I were trying to switch to a creampuff for more trying reasons. </p>
<p>“The major problem with transferring the MIT system to Berkeley is that many of Berkeley’s weeders occur rather late in the process. For example, CS 150 is a harsh weeder, and I rather doubt that many first-semester freshmen - which is when the MIT P/NR grading system is in effect - would have the wherewithal to take that class. The prereqs of CS 150 are CS 61C and EE 40 or 42, and these are true prereqs in the sense that you really do need to know that stuff in order to be prepared for the course.”</p>
<p>This is actually a good point, there are some weeders even down the road. Though, I kinda have to say 61C does a fairly good job of brutalizing students in the first place. I do know 150 is quite a horror, but anyway, I think the MIT system might be a start.</p>
<p>“personally think that all majors should be given the bailout option. If you’re not going to major in a particular topic, who cares that you got poor grades in that topic? Just wipe those poor grades from their transcript. Make the option available to all majors. One nice feature would be that certain majors wouldn’t benefit from this reform because they already “protect” students’ transcripts from poor grades by not even giving out those poor grades in the first place. Hence, my reform wouldn’t help those majors, but that actually gets to my central point - it is deeply unfair that certain majors are graded easier than others. While I won’t be able to equate the differing grading standards used by different majors, I can at least ameliorate the problem of students stuck with poor grades from majors they are no longer in.”</p>
<p>Sakky, I am under the impression that at least for graduate schools, it is really the subject you’re applying under whose coursework will be judged? I.e., if I’m a math major with an F in a history class, to take whatever random example, will the history class not affect me? I would think that the bigger worry is that if someone transferred out of EECS, or any other major, really late, there’d be not enough of whatever other coursework on the transcript to demonstrate enough to grad schools, except in some shining star, exceptional cases.</p>
<p>Now, of course, not everyone’s motivation in going to college is grad school, but I’m wondering specifically about this. A grad student I know at Berkeley’s math department said he, out of boredom, didn’t go to a certain class or two (maybe humanities?) and failed, but had all A’s in math classes, and other good stuff. </p>
<p>For my own info, what are some cases where a switch of major plus bad grades in the old major would be particularly bad? (OK, other than med school ;))</p>
<p>Law school (reference slicmlic2001’s ‘GPA protection’ strategy). Business school. Basically, any professional grad school.</p>
<p>Then there are the major international scholarships such as the Rhodes or the Marshall. The sad fact is, if you have a subpar cumulative GPA, you’re not going to be competitive for these scholarships. Heck, you may not even be able to apply. The Marshall Scholarship, for example, specifically states that to even apply, you must have a minimum 3.7 GPA. If you can’t meet that threshold because your GPA had been broken asunder because you were trying out engineering for a few semesters before switching to some other major, the scholarship committee doesn’t care. That’s your problem. All they care about is that you don’t have a 3.7, so you can’t even apply. </p>
<p>*
Q: As an undergraduate I did not have a GPA above 3.7 but as a graduate student I do. Would my graduate GPA make me eligible or is the GPA criterion based on your undergraduate (BA degree) GPA only?</p>
<p>A: Unfortunately you would not eligible for a Marshall Scholarship, as you have to have a GPA of 3.7 for your undergraduate degree only *</p>
<p>And then of course there are many employers out there who won’t even give you an interview if you don’t meet a GPA threshold (usually 3.0, but sometimes 3.5 or even higher). Similarly to the Marshall scholarship committee, they won’t care why you can’t meet that threshold. All they will see is that you didn’t meet the threshold. </p>
<p>So I ask again: what does it matter what your grades are in a particular subject if you’re not going to major in that subject anyway? So what? Who cares? Wipe those grades away. Let people walk away with a clean slate. Let them move on with their lives. Let them pursue something in which they will succeed. You shouldn’t have your academic record permanently damaged just because you tried out a major and found out that it wasn’t for you.</p>
<p>Our society is set up in a manner that rewards those who succeed and punishes those who fail. We cannot afford to have a large number of individuals succeeding. If someone initially ruined their GPA for whatever reason and they do not meet the rigid GPA requirement for graduate school or employment, then they should not apply for them. For many individuals in this forum, when they write about graduate school or employment, they usually mean a top 20 program or an entry position that pays $50,000+. A 3.0 Berkeley GPA will most definitely not get you in the aforementioned but it can get you into a decent job or graduate school. </p>
<p>Generally, a sub-par GPA does not necessary preclude most people from graduate/employment. The person will need to work much harder to compensate for the GPA component of their application. That is why standardized tests exist. For instance, how would you rate the following two law school applicants applying to a top 30 law school? Candidate A has a 3.7 GPA and 165 LSAT score and candidate B has a 3.5 GPA and 170 LSAT score? Some will argue that they may be fairly even. If you include some substantial work experience to candidate B, he may have an edge over candidate A. </p>
<p>Time is another element that will alleviate a lackluster GPA. The further an applicant can distant themselves from their depressing undergraduate performances, the better their chances at getting into graduate school or finding employment. Moreover, a weak GPA only hinders the recent college graduate from getting that first job. Once seasoned, employers mainly look at work experience. To reiterate, a sub-par GPA is not the end of the world. You just need to work smarter & harder.</p>
<p>“If someone initially ruined their GPA for whatever reason and they do not meet the rigid GPA requirement for graduate school or employment, then they should not apply for them. For many individuals in this forum, when they write about graduate school or employment, they usually mean a top 20 program or an entry position that pays $50,000+. A 3.0 Berkeley GPA will most definitely not get you in the aforementioned but it can get you into a decent job or graduate school.”</p>
<p>My comment - I am all for rewarding people who really succeed, and not rewarding those who have less to show, but I think Sakky’s point is that those who’ve SWITCHED majors and really changed course should be judged on their new, enlightened perspective. I don’t think they should have to worry about their early GPA’s, because as is, they have only 2 years to demonstrate good showings, and that’s hard enough! </p>
<p>I think it’s much less likely that if someone changes gears after 2 years in a major, and works hard at the new major for the next 2 years, employment will become a problem. Frankly, I think employers just want you to do the job, and if your last 2 years are convincing, they’ll probably think you matured up, and not care. </p>
<p>Grad school is a bit more questionable, because it’s ultimately an academic endeavor, even if different from the undergrad stage. So having less to show may be a matter of concern. And I do think anything one can do to alleviate the situation for someone changing gears should be done…</p>
<p>I don’t know what is the most feasible option, though.</p>
<p>Sakky, I see what you mean. Lots and lots and lots of professional schools. Actually, now you mention it, exactly and precisely the guy looking to professional schools are the friends of mine who harp on their GPA’s. </p>
<p>I guess this is a serious issue then, and people should be able to move on with their lives. Because most people aren’t headed to an academic grad school, more likely going to a professional school or to work.</p>
<p>“And then of course there are many employers out there who won’t even give you an interview if you don’t meet a GPA threshold (usually 3.0, but sometimes 3.5 or even higher). Similarly to the Marshall scholarship committee, they won’t care why you can’t meet that threshold. All they will see is that you didn’t meet the threshold.”</p>
<p>This sounds terrible!!! And completely unnecessary. Whew, all for the clean slate.</p>
<p>“Our society is set up in a manner that rewards those who succeed and punishes those who fail. We cannot afford to have a large number of individuals succeeding. If someone initially ruined their GPA for whatever reason and they do not meet the rigid GPA requirement for graduate school or employment, then they should not apply for them.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that a plan to clean slates will produce overabundance of success anyway. Only if the given student is proactive and figures out what is right for him/her (in which case I’d say he/she deserves to be called successful) will there be success. Especially at a school like Berkeley, if someone doesn’t transfer to a really easy major (most of the standard majors people consider for professional schools aren’t these anyway), it’ll take all the effort in the world to succeed. </p>
<p>The point is not even to be forgiving, it’s to be harsh only when there is a real reason, not living by the philosophy of “Oh, well they made a mistake, they’re done.”</p>
<p>On the macro level, I would agree with you; it is simply tautologically true that not everybody can succeed.</p>
<p>But we are not talking about everybody. We are talking only about the students at Berkeley, which comprise only a tiny sliver of the entire population. Berkeley can indeed change its system such that more of its students can ‘succeed’ in the sense of getting top grades that make them more competitive for better jobs and better grad-school slots.</p>
<p>Lest you think this is unrealistic, allow me to point out that this is precisely what schools like Stanford, Harvard, and Yale do. Those schools hardly ever hand out truly bad grades; their reputations for grade inflation is legendary; it’s practically impossible to get a truly bad GPA at those schools. {As a case in point, George Bush and John Kerry had both freely admitted to being a couple of ne’er-do-wells as college students, yet Yale graduated both of them anyway.} But that means that their students are primed for success. If those schools can do that, surely Berkeley can do the same. </p>
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<p>Why? Why should that be the case? Why should somebody lose out on opportunities simply because he tried out a major early on that wasn’t for him? </p>
<p>See below.</p>
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<p>Again, why? Why should you need to work smarter and harder? Just because you made a mistake in choosing a difficult initial major that wasn’t the right fit for you, you’re now relegated to having to work harder and be smarter than everybody else? Come on now. We’re talking about 17-18 year old kids here. Few of them really know what they want to study. Many of them are going to make mistakes. </p>
<p>This is particularly true with regards to engineering. I don’t know about you, but my high school didn’t offer any engineering courses. I’m quite sure that most people’s high schools did not. Hence, you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. You don’t know whether you will like it or not. </p>
<p>But in any case, if what you are saying is true, then that just means that people will simply be rationally discouraged from even trying difficult majors in the first place. People are then incentivized to follow the slicmlic2001 strategy: to just take easy courses to protect their GPA. Is that really the kind of behavior that Berkeley should be trying to teach - that you should not take risks? That you should not try to learn difficult topics? Instead, you should just try to find a way to game the system and get the highest possible GPA for the least possible work?</p>
<p>“I don’t know about you, but my high school didn’t offer any engineering courses. I’m quite sure that most people’s high schools did not. Hence, you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. You don’t know whether you will like it or not.”</p>
<p>Hugely important point. College just ain’t like high school, and it’s really tough to have a life plan set up, even for students for narrow interests, before they try what they think they’ll like in college. Schools like Cal are reputed undergrad institutions, and definitely should try to maximize the success of their undergrads…sure, in theory one could argue that it’s enough for Cal to provide classes and resources for students, but the more a school looks out for its students, especially at the naive stages of their careers, the better a job it’s doing.</p>
<p>It’s extremely difficult to compare public versus privates universities for numerous reasons which I will not get into. Everyone will agree that H/Y/S are more difficult to get into than Berkeley. I don’t know the statistics for people choosing Berkeley over H/Y/S for undergrad (I am sure it is out there somewhere on the web), but I assume it cannot be that high.</p>
<p>H/Y/S are difficult to get into, but once you are admitted the grading process is much easier than Cal. I am a product of Cal, but if I can say with tremendous conviction that if I was admitted into H/Y/S I would choose them over Cal in a hearth-beat.
Part of Cal’s brand and prestige is its reputation for being a difficult institution. It would be extremely strange for Cal to change its grading structure so that the average graduating student has .2 higher GPA without getting external criticism from peer institutions for grade inflation.</p>
<p>The old adage that says the cream rises to the top is probably true at Cal. I am sure the top 20% of graduates (~5000) have comparable grades to the 100% graduating class of H/Y/S (~6000). Where I will have to disagree with you is that somehow we adjust the 20% figure at Cal to 40%. In theory this may sound great, but it screws over the original top 20% at Cal in that it increases competition to the top graduate schools and jobs of which there are not every many. If someone is capable of greatness, then they will find a way to succeed. Sure a good GPA helps tremendously, but is it really a requisite to success? I do not think it is always mandatory. </p>
<p>I also cannot agree with a university policy that expunges records after the fact. We might as well call ourselves UC Stanford. Let’s assume that Joe is a Berkeley undecided freshman who decides to try out engineering and does poorly in it. And he changes his major and does well in the new major. What does this tell me? If I had to objectively evaluate Joe, here would be how it goes. Joe is not as smart as the top 20% at Berkeley or anyone in H/Y/S because of the following reasons:
He was not able to get into H/Y/S and if he was accepted, he wasn’t smart enough to choose H/Y/S and instead choose Cal and decided to “try out engineering” and ruin his GPA.
He did not thoroughly research Berkeley engineering by talking to his friends or reading about it on the web.
He does not have the competency to grasp a difficult subject for whatever reason and failed his classes.
He should have dropped his classes before it was too late (Cal needs to increase the drop deadline to more than what it currently is).
If he is “trying out engineering” he should have taken it P/NP.
He should have really known better.</p>
<p>So do I feel bad for Joe? Not really. He lacks judgment and is not up to handling difficult subject matter. I know this is a harsh assessment of Joe, but then again, it’s not the end of the world. </p>
<p>This sounds silly, but I think they should incorporate a mandatory component of orientation that makes every admitted student sign a waiver that says something along the lines of: </p>
<p>This school is ridiculously hard and your grades are in serious jeopardy if you take a class just to “try it out.” If you want a good GPA when you graduate, then you better not be a dumbass and experiment with EECS classes. Experimenting is what you do back in your dorm. </p>
<p>The state of California is broke and this is a public university. We are not charging 30k/year and your daddy is not contributing to the endowment like he is suppose to so we will not hold your hand and tell you what classes you need to or not need to take. I know 90% of you guys were in the top 10% of your high school and you were the big fish in a small pond. Well guess what? You are now a minnow in an ocean with sharks and the sharks are these freaking dorky little 14-16 year old prodigies that will destroy your GPA while wearing their pokemon shirts. So unless you do not know any better, you better take an experimental class P/NP. </p>
<p>By signing below, you are stating that you have read this agreement and you agree not to cry when you see your transcript. Berkeley is a top 20 university and the number public university for a reason. If you want easy classes then go to community college. We pride ourselves in our arduous curriculum, the fact that all of our campus buildings with two stories or more come equipped with bars and our state of the art Tang Mental Health Center (which is where you will end up once you see your first semester grades unless you have carefully read this disclaimer and follow its advice closely).</p>
<p>And graduate schools similar to undergraduate admission do factor this in. The evaluate grade trends etc. Do I think a 3.5 GPA deserves a Marshall/Rhodes scholarship? No. And I would be quite annoyed if someone with a 3.5 GPA wasted my time by applying. Hence, the 3.7 GPA requirement.</p>
<p>Tax Bear - I myself agree that changing Cal’s policies in terms of difficult grading and such would be highly strange, and would hardly ever pass with the university. And I don’t even see a need for this. This isn’t what we’re discussing really - it’s whether someone who tried out a major (NOT NECESSARILY TOO UNINTELLIGENT FOR THE MAJOR!) and didn’t LIKE it and potentially had a bad time with it because it wasn’t his/her thing shouldn’t have to suffer.</p>
<p>Now, it is valid that letting someone kind of switch out whenever and wipe transcripts clean is a little too fluid a system. College transcripts ought to reflect a bunch of years of effort! Let me address a few little things before proposing anything.</p>
<p>“4) He should have dropped his classes before it was too late (Cal needs to increase the drop deadline to more than what it currently is).
5) If he is “trying out engineering” he should have taken it P/NP.
6) He should have really known better.”</p>
<p>This is not possible in the College of Engineering today. Just not. They force you to take all technical courses for a letter grade. So you seem to be suggesting exactly what I would naturally suggest, which is to make the first year P/NP. Or to give the option of taking technical courses P/NP!! If your option were available, sure. </p>
<p>You can’t reasonably say that students shouldn’t get to try out the major in their first year without penalty – young college students just haven’t seen engineering before! WAY too few exceptions to that. I don’t think we’re dumbing down Berkeley in any way by making the first year a test run. In fact, I think it’s in a sense more rigorous this way, because you never get graded on anything but the real stuff, starting sophomore year.</p>
<p>I do think we should reward proactive students over flounderingly indecisive ones, hence make the first year their chance for experimentation. Beyond the first year, I think we’re getting into the territory where students should be doing serious work. </p>
<p>Even if the upper div courses come mainly in those years, I think that it’d be clear upon hitting the very first upper div course that the real scale major is not for them even if the lower div courses were OK. I don’t see many cases where there will be such a HUGE shock, because our lower div curriculum is often not easy anyway, even if some of the upper classes are particularly hard. And one upper div course with a bad grade won’t hurt anyone. They should move on. </p>
<p>Here, I’m trying to be realistic in seeing what the University would consider practical. I favor rewarding prudent students, neither a sink/float atmosphere nor an utter handholding atmosphere.</p>
<p>This ain’t making the school too easy, unless we think MIT is too easy! (Well dunno, MIT may only do the P/NP thing first semester, but I don’t think doing it for a year is too much.)</p>
for more trying reasons. </p>