<p>I have just been admitted to the College of Arts and Sciences; I put political science as my major. I want to know how does Berkeley rank students: do they rank based on deaprtment? or do they rank a whole class together? Also, if they do rank nased on department, how many students each class are in the politicial science department?</p>
<p>hello? please reply</p>
<p>actually, its the College of Letters and Sciences (aka "L&S). But, to answer your question, the adcoms do not care what major applicants put down for L&S, since most kids change their major 2-3 times. So they do not rank the applicants by dept in L&S; of course, engineering is a different matter.</p>
<p>Cal’s poli sci department is great, btw. You might e-mail the department and ask how many grads they had last year.</p>
<p>But they do rank in the Letters and Sciences as a whole right? or the whole 6,000 students per class?</p>
<p>Why does this matter?</p>
<p>Class Rankings no longer matter after High School …</p>
<p>Berkeley does not rank its graduates.</p>
<p>Hmmm. I didnt know Berkeley didn’t rank. I was thinking that grad schools look at college rank. However, is it true that Berkeley does put their students in certain positions? like top 4% or top 10%.</p>
<p>In the sense that that is where the various honors cutoffs are, then yes, Berkeley ranks. For example, if somebody says that he graduated from Berkeley summa cum laude, then you know he graduated in the top 3%.</p>
<p>The problem with this is something I have pointed out a lot - namely that these distinctions are determined by GPA within a particular college. Yet the fact is, various majors within the same college are graded differently, such that it is easier to get high grades in certain majors than in others. Yet those honors GPA cutoffs don’t care about that. Honors are doled out strictly by GPA, regardless of how difficult your major is.</p>
<p>What I think Berkeley should do is dole out various honors by individual major. Hence, if you want to get summa, you should have to graduate in the top 3% within your particular major, not just by college.</p>
<p>They do have honors cutoffs for majors. At least for poli sci, econ, and mcb …</p>
<p>Sakky, Berkeley doesn’t use latin terminology for honors. They have highest distinction, high distiction and distiction to break down honors.</p>
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<p>Berkeley doesn’t do so formally. But informally speaking, it is widely understood that the ‘distinction’ rankings map directly into the Latin honors.</p>
<p>“UC Berkeley does not use the Latin terminology for honors. It may be understood that highest distinction is equivalent to summa cum laude; high distinction to magna cum laude; and distinction is equivalent to cum laude.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/collegepolicies/honors.html[/url]”>http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/collegepolicies/honors.html</a></p>
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<p>Honors within the major is not the same thing as general scholarship honors. You can both, or just one and not the other.</p>
<p>I’m just pointing out that they don’t use latin terminology.</p>
<p>Much of the student body widely uses it among themselves informally even if Berkeley doesn’t formally do so.</p>