That’s how it worked for UCSD. Each major had a specified list of screening courses, such as math, physics, etc. Applicants completed the screening courses, then competed on the basis of grades in those screening courses. If too many applicants fell into the highest GPA category, they would use a lottery.
This system wasn’t working well. Because of excessive demand for limited spaces, applicants for some majors were being turned away with as high as 4.0 GPA in the screening courses. This is after these students spent the year investing their time in taking the screening courses, and using up their single chance that year at trying to enter the major.
Prior to UCB L&S CS (now CCDSS CS) going to a semi-direct-admission model, getting into the L&S CS major meant:
Getting admitted to UCB L&S (which did not admit by major).
Earning a 3.3 college GPA in CS 61A, 61B, 70 (which were not graded competitively or on a curve).
Note that criterion 2 was not always the same. At some point in the early 2010s, it was changed to the 3.3 in three courses from the previous 3.0 in seven courses. Prior to that, in the mid 2000s, the GPA threshold was 2.0 (i.e. not a high demand or capped major), due to lack of interest after the crash in the early 2000s.
The department was reluctant to raise the GPA threshold any higher than 3.3 or change to a competitively determined GPA threshold for various reasons, but was also finding the ever increasing enrollment in L&S CS to be a strain on instructional resources (the motivation for lobbying L&S to allow for the semi-direct-admission for high demand majors).
…until this house of cards collapsed due to excessive interest in CS, too many CS majors, and inability to keep hiring inexpensive undergraduate TAs. So at that point they had to cut way back on admitting CS-intended kids into L&S.
In the past, LS students had to get 3.3 from 3 specific CS lower division courses - 61A, 61B, 70. Going back a few years, the GPA cutoff was 3.0. That cutoff wasn’t sufficient to stem the tide of over enrollment. So Cal changed it to 3.3 but that wasn’t enough either because they estimated that to bring down enrollment to manageable levels the cutoff had to be ridiculously high around 3.8+
Now the comment related to math competition - CS 70 is the hardest of the 3 required courses and is graded on a hard curve. The course content is heavily proofs and induction. This is primarily a hard math course rather than a CS course but very relevant for CS algorithm development etc. even for the people who get As in the other two, a B+ in 70 can be hard. This course absolutely stressed people out and the people who tended to do well in it are those who had prior math competition experience. Not saying others don’t do well but there was a huge disadvantage to people without the right math prep.
Cal explicitly wanted a holistic overhaul of the switch process for LS and mentioned the stress associated with CS70 as one of the factors. Hope this helps.
thanks, this context is helpful and i went ahead and looked at what cs70 is. it is basically combinatorics and probability class, but i would not call it a math competition class. it is possible that students who take math competitions have some early advantage on combinatorics type of things, but those early math competitions don’t test calculus which is needed in these probability theories. that said, i can understand why it would stress out some people especially if they don’t have aptitude for it. but you could argue that some people with early exposure to programming and software engineering may get easy As on CS61A and CS61B. since knowledge of CS70 is useful to being a CS major, I would say there is nothing wrong with that being included as a screening course. after all, UCB is not a trade school, its job is to give a solid CS education and some students will find some courses hard. this type of class has been an integral part of CS curriculum even when I was a student. i am assuming CS/EECS majors still have to take cs70 as a part of their major requirement.
Probably the more important aspect of math background and ability for CS 70 is math with proofs. Many (not all) students find math with proofs to be more difficult.
Note that CS 70 is not that unique, in that discrete math courses (with proofs) are commonly required in CS majors at many colleges. CS 70 does add some probability theory which is commonly a separate course at many colleges, but students taking CS 70 are typically at the stage where they have completed calculus.
yes, it seems like pretty standard requirement. thanks for the link! it seems like a really good course to me. makes sense to be a screening requirement. and why such animosity towards kids who did math competitions and might get a bit of a head start in this course. different people have different advantages/strengths. most of these math competitions are free or very low cost.
However, CS70 is the last class people take in the sequence and it is a “hard curved” class. This is where prior math maturity and exposure makes a huge difference. The whole L&S undeclared → CS policy wasn’t intended as the exclusive gateway for high-stats CS interested kids. Cal saw that a lot of these kids with significant math headstart used the LS declaration process as a backdoor rather than apply direct to EECS. There is of course nothing wrong with that approach but it added a tremendous amount of pressure on “normal” kids who may not have had the same preparation. A hardworking smart normal kid would still be at a disadvantage when graded on a curve in a class with math olympiad kids.
Also, you severely underestimate the difficulty level of that course as an introductory proofs course. Don’t just look at syllabus - spend a bit of time on the actual exams themselves and you will realize the order of magnitude of difficulty is very high and success is very sensitive to prior math prep. This locked out CS interested kids who may not have had the advantages relative to what I loosely categorized as the “math comp” kids.
With the high demand major policy change, Cal basically dared those kids to either apply to the real major of interest or be willing to compete via a more holistic process. I don’t think it was done out of malice but because of practical limitations in offering slots and the intent to ensure those slots are not locking out other disadvantaged kids.
Here’s an excerpt from a document that outlined Cal’s rationale when the policy was devised.
I think this discussion is a bit far off from the topic of the thread, so I will try to make this my last response. Not sure what is being meant by “math olympiad” kids. Anybody can organize a math competition in their neighborhood and call it math olympiad. Nobody takes that seriously. But kids who perform well ( at least get honorable mention) in Bay Area Math Olympiad, International Math Olympiad are very very good at math. Very few of them , if any at all, are at UC Berkeley and trying to change their major to CS. Even if you find one or two, they wouldn’t impact the curve.
UC Berkeley EECS and other departments have lots of kids who have had all sorts of advantages in their life - internship in high school due to parents’ connections, excellent extracurriculars, summer camps etc. It seems odd to me that the kids who are being targeted here have some math competition experience. These kind of competitions don’t require any monetary advantage.
As an aside, I know some people who are at UC Berkeley Math, mostly east European immigrants, who are enthusiastic about teaching these type of math and have selflessly contributed a significant part of their life to development of mathematical talent in Bay area. I wonder what they would have to say about this. Regardless it wouldn’t matter.
If only you knew. But yeah, this discussion is far off course. I will let others comment on the UCSD policy from here on.