<p>To answer your question, first of all, I believe the admissions process is substantially flawed. I suspect that the flaw probably lies in the transfer-student admissions. But I’m not sure. However, I am fairly confident that the admissions could be significantly tightened up. </p>
<p>However, your second point is probably far more to the mark, and that is where I would concentrate my efforts on the most. Slackerness does tend to surface out of some students. There are entire swaths of students who haven’t been to class and haven’t studied anything in weeks. Don’t believe me? Just take a walk down fraternity row or go to some of the coops or some of the dorms, and you will notice some people who haven’t even been on campus for awhile. And then of course, like I said, there are people who have been undergrads for 8,9, or even 10+ and still haven’t graduated, and in some cases, aren’t even close. Come on, I think we can all agree that that’s getting ridiculous. Does anybody care to defend these people.</p>
<p>How do these people survive? Simple. They get into those easy, ‘gut’ majors where you not only hardly ever have to study, you never even have to show up, and you can still not only pass, but in some cases, pass with top grades. I know one guy who took a class in which he never showed up (not even once), and never bothered to do any of the reading. The class grade was based on writing 2 papers off the books. Instead of actually reading the books, all he did was just go to Amazon and read the user-reviews of those books, and basically rephrased those reviews in his own words as the basis for his papers. He ended up with an ‘A-’ in the class. </p>
<p>I know another guy who whenever final exams rolled around, when he realized he wasn’t going to do well in an exam, would just complain that he has a stomach-ache or a headache or some other ailment and ask to be excused from taking the exam, perhaps with a grade of an ‘I’ (Incomplete), or whatever. To back himself up, he would present a doctor’s note attesting to his ‘illness’. In reality, the doctor that he got these notes from was actually his cousin, who was an MD (because he had graduated from medical school), but was still just a low-level intern at the time. His cousin never bothered to examine him for any ‘condition’ he had, he just wrote him the notes for him because he is family. Hence, this guy is just allowed to hang around Berkeley for years and years without graduating, and whenever hs has to do an assignment or an exam he doesn’t want to do, out pops that “doctor’s note”. </p>
<p>What I’m advocating is that these games have to end, and end immediately. Berkeley can’t be having all these easy majors carrying all these students who never show up and never want to work. Either these students have to be convinced that they need to shape up, or Berkeley needs to get rid of them. </p>
<p>I know that somebody is going to say “Well other schools have lazy and shiftless students too”, so let me just head off that objection right now. Who cares what other schools are doing? What matters is what Berkeley is doing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if Berkeley solves its laziness problem and other schools don’t, then Berkeley will be better off than those other schools.</p>