UC Berkeley - Class of 2022 Applicants Thread

ProfessorPlum168
Wed, 11 Jul 2018 16:04:36 +0000

@ElenaParent I’m going to guess that some of those AP units and some of the CC units will eventually not be useable. Most L&S majors will need a bare minimum of 50 units, more likely 60 units. Breadth requirements, R&C and AC will take up another 30-35 units. AP won’t cover your breadth and AC classes. If you got a 5 in AP Lit it would cover all of R&C. You’re not allowed to go much over 120 units (AP units are excluded from this calculation). Maybe 130 units max before you need to start “uncrediting” units? (Not sure what the technical term is.)

My kid and I went through an iteration of a 4-year planner (we used the spreadsheet template that the CS department has). Now my kid has 41 CC units and I think will be granted 36 units via AP. Even with that, it’s still going to take a minimum of 3 years to graduate under a normal 16 unit a semester load with a reasonable amount of spreading out of upper division classes. What will complicate things and make things go longer is the exploration part. Part of the reason why L&S CS is better than EECS for my kid is that he has a bit more flexibility in terms of electives, and being potentially being able to double major or minor in something else nontechnical perhaps. And he’ll definitely use some of his electives to take intro courses in other areas. He’s already going to do this this semester with Intro to Data Science. So each one of those electives “takes up” units that the AP units were supposed to do. In some cases, a free elective does kill two birds with one stone, by fulfilling a breadth. For example, Intro to Cognitive Science would be needed if he wanted to minor or double major in Cognitive Science, but it also fulfills a Social Sciences breadth.