sakky--What is your relationship with UC Berkeley?

davidn08 · April 16, 2005, 1:19am

I agree with most of what sakky is saying, and I think her intentions are all good, and she is at most slightly biased, so every1 should stop being so critical of her.

I was accepted to Berkeley Engineering from NY, and I got screwed out of acceptences from schools like MIT and Stanford, mainly coz I didn’t have my green card, and was in a strange “international from America” category. I’m pretty sure I’m going to Berkeley.

Firstly, sakky, how much does all the bad stuff you mention apply to engineering? (The engineering program ranks 3rd in the country, for grad and undergrad).
Honestly, as some1 that got 1500s, all 5s, all 800s, and was salutatorian, I don’t consider myself elitist, coz I have no problem being in classes full of 1400 people… but the fact that Berkeley takes people with 1100’s, that’s where I start being an elitist. I just think there is such a thing as too much diversity… I’m sure the 1100 people would consider me a geek and wouldn’t want me as a fellow student.

A few points about what sakky has said:

Firstly, what can we (and I literally mean you and I) do to change this stuff?

Secondly, all your ideas points sound so perfect and efficient in so many ways, so why doesn’t Berkeley want to do it? It seems like they have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Thirdly, you say Berkeley shouldn’t have slackers, coz many other people want the seats. But surely Berkeley takes all the students that seem least likely to be slackers… Are you saying that they do admissions wrong, or that once the “slackerness” surfaces, the students should be kicked out?

About level of work:
Admission to schools like Caltech and MIT is insanely competitive, and I would imagine that slackers make up a tiny minority, and that generally the students work so hard that, for example, at Caltech, it makes them miserable. I’m against that level of work, but there is a long way between that and spending days doing nothing but drinking.

BigBrother · April 16, 2005, 2:08am

There will not be people with 1100s in your engineering classes.

dstark · April 16, 2005, 2:14am

davidn08, you are going to work your a** off, and if you don’t you aren’t going to cut it. Any slackers in engineering are toast.

West_Sidee · April 16, 2005, 3:23am

Also remember that the 25th -75th% SAT percentile of Berkeley is not 1200-1450 (2004 Freshman Class data) using the methodology that private schools use.

Imagine your best one sitting SAT score (that berkeley and most public schools use) and your best verbal + best math score that private schools use. You will find a 30-50 point difference in the scores. If you use the same SAT methodology for Berkeley that private schools use, then the 25th - 75th percentile is 1250-1500. Given that 3500 students are in the incoming class, that means about 875 people are 1500 SAT and above, and 875 are 1250 SAT and below. Also, because of people who complain like Sakky, UC Berkeley reduced their offers to sub-1030 SAT scorers significantly by about 33% to about 2% of the student body(<a href=“http://ktla.trb.com/news/local/ktla-me-ucadmit4apr04-lat,0,5145283.story?coll=ktla-newslocal-1[/url]”>http://ktla.trb.com/news/local/ktla-me-ucadmit4apr04-lat,0,5145283.story?coll=ktla-newslocal-1</a>) That means there will be about 70 students in a class of 3500 that will have a below 1030-1050 SAT. Most of these lower scoring students I are probably athletes, or people who study extremely hard and just have bad SAT scores. Also keep in mind that top private schools offer the same sub-par SAT scores to rich legacies, whereas UC Berkeley saves them for poor disadvantaged students.

There will be about 875 students with 1500+ SAT in your classes. Sheer number wise, this is the highest number in the entire US out of any university. I don’t think anyone is worried about the quality of the Berkeley undergraduate class.

dmcwhiz123 · April 16, 2005, 3:56am

hmmmmm, well if we didnt accept sucky students, how else can we have a drop out rate and accept transfer students without getting rid of “smart” ppl???

jp jp

West_Sidee · April 16, 2005, 4:04am

^ Students with 1050 SAT and below (2% of Berkeley) have shown to have similiar graduation rates with those that score 1450 and above. They are not “sucky” students, they just have worse SAT scores, and work just as hard as any other students at Berkeley.

3% of the student body at Harvard also scored below 1000 on the SAT. 6-8% at ivies score below 1100 on the SAT. However, these spaces are saved for rich legacies, while Berkeley saves them for poor disadvantaged students who work hard. I tend to agree with Berkeley’s policy very very strongly.

Anyways, I hope the new Chancellor is able to bring back Affirmative Action. The old Chancellor Chang Lin Tien was very much pro Affirmative Action.

davidn08 · April 16, 2005, 10:22am

I realize that Berkeley engineering students work extremely hard, and I have no problem with that. In fact, since the program allows me to have classes that I really find interesting, I’ll be happy to work hard.

However, the Caltech students are known as being the most miserable in the country, I think the work level and competition is even more insane there than at Berkeley engineering (which in my case, is good)

sakky · April 16, 2005, 1:04pm

West Sidee, again with the dubious SAT math. We talked about this before, and I am tired of repeating myself. Basically, you exaggerate the number of high-SAT-scorers at Berkeley.

I agree that there is a 30-50 point boost when taking the SAT’s again. But that boost is not spread evenly. You cannot say that, oh, well the 25/75 range is X to Y, therefore we can just presume that the 25/75 range for a second-attempt is X+50 to Y+50. No. The boost tends to be concentrated on the lower end, simply because the people who score low have more room to improve. Hence, the 25/75 range for a second attempt is X+A to Y+B, where A is more than 50, and B is less than 50. People who score high and take the exam again tend to improve less than the people who score low and take the exam again.

Second of all, I see that you are using the highest possible number to make your numbers look good. You yourself concede that the boost is from 30-50 points, but then you take the highest number (50) and use that for your calculations. You should not be using the number 50.

Hence, you cannot conclude that there are 875 people who scored above a 1500 on the SAT at Berkeley.

I would also ask - are you really sure that all those low-scoring Berkeley admits are all poor and disadvantaged who work hard? Really? All of them? Some of them, yes, but all of them? I can tell you that I know some people who got into Berkeley with low scores and who are neither poor, nor disadvantaged, nor do they work hard at all.

I would also like to see the stats that people with low test scores graduate at the same rate as those with high test scores. I would also like to look at what sort of majors those low-scoring people are completing.

dstark · April 16, 2005, 1:23pm

Sakky, what is wrong with Rice, Williams and Amherst? 19% of Rice’s athletes have SAT scores below 1,000.

Athletes at Williams and Amherst make up a large percentage of the student body. I wonder if the athletes are even included in the average SAT scores of these schools.

Interstedad has some interesting comments. Here is a link:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=701671#post701671[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=701671#post701671</a>

Berkeley on its website has studies about low SAT scorers compared to higher SAT scorers. If you search SAT on Berkeley’s web site you should be able to find them.

sakky · April 16, 2005, 1:35pm

Now, to davidn08.

First off, it is a hard problem, and there isn’t a whole lot that you and I can do about it. But what you can do is get yourself on committees that get facetime with the bureaucrats. Or make use of the Daily Cal and write columns. But I’m not going to lie to you - it’s a hard problem. Basically, the Berkeley administration is completely entrenched and has little incentive to change, and lots of incentive to maintain the status quo.

Secondly, you ask why doesn’t Berkeley do it? Simple. Politics and organizational culture. Organizations simply get used to doing things a certain way, and are threatened by change. Berkeley is what it is today largely due to inertia. Moreover, the politics are treacherous. Many of my ideas are based on at least the potential threat, if not the actual threat, to remove poor-performing Berkeley students. That is politically unpopular - there would be accusations of “reducing opportunity” and other such mantras, where protesters would deliberately refuse to see that what they are really doing is defending laziness. There are a lot of Berkeley students who simply refuse to pull their weight, but a lot of people don’t want to see that.

Thirdly, you ask what should be done about slackers. Ideally, as was said in this thread, I would like to light a fire under their rear ends and start getting those slackers to actually start studying and actually being serious. However, that would obviously have to be coupled with the threat of explusion once slackerness is revealed, because, if nothing else, if that threat isn’t there, then there is nothing to truly compel these students to become serious students.

Everybody has to make a personal choice about whether he/she wants to be a serious student or not, and from a simple standpoint of common courtesy, if you decide that you don’t want to be a serious student, then the right thing for you to do is step aside and withdraw and hand your spot over to somebody who will be a serious student. Sadly, some people will choose to both not be a serious student and also not hand over their spot, so they will have to have their spots taken away from them forcibly What should have been done is that Berkeley should have never admitted those students in the first place. From a political standpoint, I understand that that’s impossible. So the next best thing is to eliminate them once they’ve demonstrated slackerness.

Just look at the situation from an end perspective. 15% of all Berkeley students never graduate. Hence, if they’re not going to graduate anyway, then it behooves Berkeley to eliminate them as quickly as possible. It doesn’t do anybody any good for these guys to hang around for years on end, and then finally drop out or flunk out. I knew of a guy who attended Berkeley for over 7 years, floating in and out of academic probation, before he was finally expelled. That’s simply ridiculous.

And to your contention of Caltech’ers and MIT people being miserable. Well, all I can tell you is that the graduation rate at Caltech and MIT is higher than that at Berkeley, despite the fact that Berkeley has plenty of ‘cheese’ majors in which people can graduate while doing very little. If people at Caltech and MIT were really miserable, then you would think that a lot of them would simply drop out and not graduate. Yet, look at the graduation rates.

You also ask about how much of this affects engineering. The CoE is obviously far far better run than L&S. So in some respects, the CoE is insulated from some of the huge slacker problems than exist in L&S.

The special characteristic of the CoE undergrad program is that, in order to eliminate the slacker problem, the CoE weeds the lower-classmen heavily, and I mean heavily. A significant portion of incoming engineering freshmen, perhaps more than half, will be ‘convinced’ (if that is the right word) by the weeding process to major in something non-engineering. Some of those students flunk out. Others just switch to an easier L&S major. Hence, the CoE dumps its weak students onto L&S.

sakky · April 16, 2005, 1:50pm

Now to dstark, first off, if you want to talk about Rice’s athletes, then we also need to talk about Berkeley’s athletes. What percentage of Berkeley’s athletes score below a 1000 on the SAT?

Secondly, when we talk about athletes, what we are usually talking about is the big-time NCAA programs, meaning Division 1-A. Neither Williams, Amherst, nor any of the other LAC’s run a large number of Division 1-A programs. Williams is a Division III school. So is Amherst. so are almost all of the LAC’s. You simply cannot compare a major division 1-A sports school like Cal to a division III school. That’s like comparing the Cal basketball team to the basketball team at Cal-State Hayward.

Thirdly, I don’t even know why you’re bringing up these other schools anyway. Again, I repeat, the issue has to do with what Berkeley has to do to improve itself. Who cares what other schools are doing? The issue is what Berkeley is doing and what it should be doing. If it’s really true that other schools are doing things that are detrimental to themselves, and Berkeley doesn’t, then Berkeley will be better than those other schools.

dstark · April 16, 2005, 1:58pm

Sakky,

Berkeley is always trying to improve itself. Did you read the Chron today?

Which benchmarks are you using to decide that Berkeley needs to improve its student body?

Oh. One more thing. You are the one that is always comparing Berkeley to other schools. This crap about Stanford being a backwater school many years ago? Where did you get that?

What’s the matter? You don’t like comparisons when other top schools are letting in students because they are athletes?

sakky · April 16, 2005, 2:57pm

First off, are the LAC’s really letting in students just because they are athletes. You have seen the average SAT scores at those LAC’s. And you cannot prove that they are not counting athletes in their SAT score pools. If you do find such proof, well, you better contact USNews and the other rankings, because that would be a major scandal.

And really, this whole ‘athletes’ angle is a tangent. I wasn’t the one who talked about athletes. Somebody else did. It’s really a red herring to me, because the fact is, while the Cal athletes may not be good students, there are plenty of other Cal students who are not good and who aren’t athletes. The problem of bad students at Cal is far far larger than simply because of the athletes. I’ll put it to you this way. Cal has about 500 scholarship athletes. Even if every single one of them were bad students (and they are not - many of the athletes in non-money sports like lacrosse or field hockey are actually quite good students), the fact is, there are far more than 500 bad students at Berkeley.

And is Berkeley always trying to improve itself? Here’s a softball question for you - is Berkeley better off today than 5 years ago, before the financial crunch? I think we can all agree that Berkeley is not as well off today as it was 5 years ago. So what does that say about the assertion that Berkeley is always trying to improve itself?

And why exactly do I need benchmarks? Surely you’re not trying to say that the Berkeley student body is as studious as it could possibly be? Do you really need a benchmark before you can conclude that a guy who hasn’t been in class in weeks is not exactly the most studious student in the world. Nobody needs a benchmark to determine that those undergrads who hang around Berkeley for 8,9, or 10 years without graduating is not exactly a serious student.

And finally, you don’t think that Stanford was a backwater school in the past? Perhaps I can provide you with reading material of the history of Stanford University and of Northern California, especially Silicon Valley. The strength of Stanford is intimately linked with the strength of Silicon Valley.

Here is a bit of it:

<a href=“http://www.websofinnovation.com/svhistory.htm[/url]”>http://www.websofinnovation.com/svhistory.htm</a>
<a href=“Internet History, World Wide Web History, Silicon Valley, Computer Companies, Computer Magazines, Netvalley”>Internet History, World Wide Web History, Silicon Valley, Computer Companies, Computer Magazines, Netvalley;

However, if you want to get into it, I recommend reading the following books:

“Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford University” by Lowen.

“A History of American Higher Education” by Thelin. I would especially concentrate on the sections that deal with the rise of the young private schools, like Stanford, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins, and how they rose to challenge the Ivy League.

“Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley” by Gillmor. Fred Terman was the legendary Stanford administrator who set Stanford on the path to greatness. Terman himself admitted that he trembled at how he was ever going to be able to build Stanford to be strong enough to compete against Berkeley. I think it’s safe to say that Berkeley does not make anybody at Stanford tremble anymore.

So if you really want to get into it, dstark, there’s some reading you can do. I’m surprised that a lot of people, especially in California, don’t realize just how quickly Stanford has risen. Anyway, if you want to understand, read the books and I think you will walk away impressed by how quickly Stanford rose from being basically nothing. The rise of Stanford is truly one of the great American success stories of the 20th century.

I’ll give you one small taste of it right now. Berkeley had already won 6 Nobel Prizes before Stanford won its first. In the early 60’s, Berkeley had something like 10 Nobel Prize winners, and Stanford had 2. What’s the count today? Berkeley has 7, Stanford has 17.

Now obviously the number of Nobel Prizes doesn’t tell the whole story. But it does serve to illustrate just how fast Stanford rose as a research institution. It was only about 40 years ago when Stanford didn’t have a single Nobel Prize winner. To go from 0 to 17 in 4 decades, you must admit, is a monumental achievement.

But in any case, dstark, what does it matter? I didn’t talk about the rise of Stanford in this thread at all. I have on other threads, but not this thread. So I wasn’t the one who brought it into the discussion, you did. I’ve looked through this thread and, until this post, you’ve talked about Stanford in this thread far far more than I have. So don’t accuse me of bringing in Stanford into this discussion. In this thread, I am just talking about what Berkeley should be doing, independently of what other schools are doing. It is other people on this thread who want to talk about other schools, not me.

avoidingwork · April 16, 2005, 3:08pm

Not sure which article in the Chron dstark is referring to, but here’s one about CAL’s UGMO team that was in the Chronicle on the 15th.
<a href=“http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/04/15/ugmo_ult.DTL[/url]”>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/04/15/ugmo_ult.DTL</a>

conor · April 16, 2005, 4:33pm

Sakky, be careful about labeling people as “bad students.” Yes, with a school the size of Cal there is a bit of everything, but just remember that even the bottom of the admit pool still did very well in highschool. Say someone has a 3.8 gpa and got 1150 on their SATs, which is near the bottom tier of students who get accepted. These kids, at most schools in the county (meaning the schools that don’t get talked about on these boards like your Washington State’s etc…) would be the academic hotshots. Now, there are those kids who come in with stellar stats and then decide to screw-off, but it looks like you guys are talking about incoming students, so those “new slackers” shouldn’t be included. Anyway, I’m rambling, but my point is that yes, compared to the average student at Harvard, the guy with the 3.8 might be considered a “bad student,” but in the real world that person would be comended for getting A’s in nearly all of his/her classes.

West_Sidee · April 16, 2005, 4:55pm

Sakky. While I agree that Berkeley can use some improvements, you will see that for the incoming freshman class in 2004, they cut sub par 1030 SAT scorers from 3% to 2%. Because of people like you who complained endlessly about these sub par SAT students.

Sakky, if you want to argue whether the boost on the upper end is the same as the boost on the shorter end, then by all means go ahead. But nothing we say addresses the fact that organizations like US News and Princeton Review DO USE INCORRECT SAT METHODOLOGY STATISTICS for Berkeley and other publics. Although the difference to you is slight, there are so many uneducated people out there about this that it affects a LOT of perception out there.

Regardless of whether Berkeley has 900 or 800 people with 1500+ on the SAT, its still the MOST OUT OF ANY UNIVERSITY. This fact is important when investment banking recruiters come and want to see as many smart people to fill up 25 analyst spots as possible.

I agree with you that beauracracy exists at Berkeley. But I don’t see it as any more than 2 early morning phone calls and a 30 minute wait at Sproul per semester. The image of Berkeley students always worrying about big classes all day is simply untrue. I rather have a large class with an amazing professor than a small lecture by a TA like they have at Columbia.

Berkeley can improve, sure. What university can’t? Also, yes I am sure all those low scoring SAT students (all 2% of them) are good students. They have the similar graduation rates with students that score above 1400 on the SAT. And you still haven’t addressed the fact that at Harvard and other ivies, they have 3% of students with sub 1000 SAT, and 6-8% with sub par 1100 SAT. I repeat, I TEND TO AGREE WITH BERKELEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF SAVING SPOTS FOR POOR DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS rather than RICH DUMB LEGACIES at Harvard. As a recruiter, I always look for SAT scores BECAUSE OF THOSE DUMB LEGACIES that might slip by on arrogance and posture. At least if a sub par 1000 SAT student graduated from Berkeley, you can be assured that they at least worked hard. If I see a sub par 1000 SAT from Harvard, you know that it would have been impossible for him to fail with a class average of 3.4 GPA, and he could have easily squeaked by. Granted a sub par 1000 SAT from Berkeley is much harder working than a sub par 1000 from Harvard, given that they both graduated.

I do not have any statistics to back it up, but it is generally well known in the investment banking community that Berkeley investment bankers are the hardest working of the bunch because of the rigorous coursework and grade deflation. Berkeley is the real world, someone is not going to hold your hand in life and show you every step of the way. I am sorry that you feel that we should let in rich dumb legacies instead of poor hard working students, but if that is your real gripe with Berkeley, then I seriously doubt that you understand what Berkeley is all about.

sakky · April 22, 2005, 11:42pm

Let’s see, West Sidee (aka rayray222/california1600/WestSide), allow me to follow your logic.

You say that you have calculated that Berkeley either has 800 or 900 undergraduates per entering class that have SAT scores of 1500+, and that’s the most of any university in the country. You also say that that is important for investment banks who want to fill their 25 analyst spots. Those are your words, not mine.

Are you sure about your claims? In particular, are you sure that Berkeley has the most 1500+ SAT scorers than any other university? Take UTAustin. Berkeley brings in about 3500 students into its freshman class. UTAustin brought in about 8000. UTAustin’s 75th percentile SAT cutoff was 1410. It seems to me that UTAustin would therefore have MORE people in its class that score over 1500 on the SAT.

<a href=“Home - UT News”>Home - UT News;

<a href=“http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/programs/bhp/admissions/documents/enrollment%20guide.pdf[/url]”>http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/programs/bhp/admissions/documents/enrollment%20guide.pdf</a>

So does is then follow that UTAustin is an even better school than Berkeley? I don’t think so, but according to your logic, West-Sidee, that’s exactly what it would mean. You were the one that said that investment banks want to go to wherever they can find lots of people who had high SAT scores. Those were your words, not mine. So, following your own logic, it would seem to me that UTAustin would be an even better place for Ibanks to recruit than Berkeley is. Keep in mind, I am not the way that’s saying that UTAustin is a better place to recruit than Berkeley is. But if I follow your logic, that’s what we would have to conclude. It is your logic, not mine.

Now I know what people are going to say - UTAustin has a lot of high-scoring students just because it is just a huge school and is going to have a lot of everything. Yet that’s the point. That’s EXACTLY the point. Just like it is true that UTAustin has lots of high-scorers just because it has a lot of people period, then it is also true that Berkeley has lots of high-scorers just because it also has lots of people period. I don’t see the IB’s saying that they would rather recruit at UTAustin rather than Harvard, Wharton, or MIT. Do you?

And you keep talking about poor disadvantaged Berkeley students vs. rich dumb legacy students at Harvard. Are you saying that all those sub-par SAT scorers at Berkeley are poor and disadvantaged? I happen to know one such Berkeley person who came from a quite comfortable middle-class background. I’ve been to the guy’s house, he actually lives in a pretty decent neighborhood in suburbia, and his house is pretty nice. He used to drive around in a Porsche 911 while he was going to Berkeley (granted, it was a used Porsche, but still, it was a hell of a lot better than anything I was driving). So, tell me again about how these sub-1000 SAT scorers at Berkeley are all poor and disadvantaged? I think that the current Berkeley students would like to hear your explanation of how exactly this supposedly poor and disadvantaged Berkeley student was tooling around campus in his Porsche.

And speaking of poor, disadvantaged students, what about those who do get into HYPSMC? Are they going to give it up to go to Berkeley? Unlikely. You and I both know that for the truly poor and disadvantaged students, HYPSMC skim the cream off. The very very best students who happen to be poor and disadvantaged tend to go to HYPSMC. Those truly poor and disadvantaged students who are still good, but not good enough to get into HYPSMC will then go to UC. The real difference is then in the quality of the students. It is of course true that HYPSMC don’t take a lot of these poor students. But who they do take tend to be the very best ones.

And finally, you keep talking about hard-workingness. You say that Berkeley investment bankers are the hardest working in the bunch because of Berkeley’s grade deflation and rigorous coursework. Oh really? The hardest working? Care to explain that to the graduates of MIT and Caltech? Are you saying that Berkeley has more grade deflation and more rigorous coursework than MIT and Caltech do? Well, you are the one that said that Berkeley grads are the hardest working. That was your direct quote. Perhaps you should come to the MIT section of CC and explain how Berkeley students are the hardest working and let’s see what the response will be.

You also talk about how students at other schools can squeak by, but Berkeley students can’t. Oh really? What of all those creampuff majors at Berkeley? You even said it yourself awhile ago - a Film Studies student at Berkeley is probably not as good as a Film Studies student at Stanford. The fact is, there are plenty of ways for a subpar Berkeley student to squeeze by without doing any work. You know it and I know it. You’ve seen those Berkeley students who hardly lift a finger and still get good grades because they take easy coursework in easy majors.

And finally, did I say that I advocated letting in rich dumb legacies instead of poor hard-working students? Please point to a quote where I said that. Oh, what’s that, you can’t do it? I didn’t think so.

What I advocate is that Berkeley get rid of the mediocre students, which it still has plenty of. The fact is, Berkeley admits some students who they shouldn’t admit. And Berkeley has some students who were formerly strong, but are now slackers, who survive by taking easy courses in easy majors. If Berkeley wants to get better, then Berkeley needs to do something about it.

I also don’t want to hear you point to other schools and say “Well, they got problems too.” Who cares if the other schools are doing wrong? What matters is what Berkeley is doing wrong. I’ll put it to you this way. If other schools do things that are wrong, and Berkeley doesn’t, then Berkeley will become better than those other schools. It is not an acceptable excuse for doing wrong things by pointing to others and saying that they are doing wrong also.

unlimitedx · April 23, 2005, 1:47am

Students who recieve financial aid lasts 10 semesters at Berkeley (probably other CA state schools also). After that, the student must pay for everything.

sakky · April 23, 2005, 2:13am

It’s not good enough just to cut off financial aid for those students who are just taking their sweet time to graduate. I think the state subsidy should also be cut off. Every year that those students are at UC, they are getting a subsidized education. Why should the taxpayers continue to subsidize those students who aren’t serious about trying to graduate? I’ve known undergrads who hang around Berkeley for 8 or even 9 years without graduating. Why should they be allowed to ride on taxpayer money?

The point is, you can’t just keep hanging around Berkeley, constantly on the taxpayer dole, without really trying to graduate. You’re taking money that could be used to do other things. More importantly, you’re taking up a spot at Berkeley that could be used by somebody else. If you’re not serious about studying and trying to get your degree, then I think the fair thing for you to do is withdraw and hand your spot to somebody who is serious.

davidn08 · April 23, 2005, 11:38am

“More importantly, you’re taking up a spot at Berkeley that could be used by somebody else. If you’re not serious about studying and trying to get your degree, then I think the fair thing for you to do is withdraw and hand your spot to somebody who is serious.”

sakky, i’ve said this before, and i’m saying this now:

in berkeley admissions, they generally choose the students that they think are the most capable of succeeding at berkeley. they choose the students that they believe are least likely to become slackers.

therefore, you’re either saying that the admissions process is flawed, that out of the applicant pool, berkeley is choosing the wrong students (and that the admissions process should be changed), or that the “slackerness” quality of a student surfaces after a certain amount of time, and students should at that point be kicked out.

obviously, if berkeley could cut its admission rate and only take 75% of the students it’s taking, that would help, but presumably no-one is suggesting that.

sakky--What is your relationship with UC Berkeley?

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