Undergraduate admissions VIP: "Berkeley is not Harvard"

vicissitudes · July 23, 2006, 9:05pm

Well, okay maybe not so drastic, but if they slowly increase enrollment you know that it will look good politically. Do you really think the general public cares enough to look up enrollment trends and the effect that has on resources? They don’t care about Berkeley. They just care that “more Californians from all communities are getting a good college education.”

I’m not saying Berkeley should turn into a HYPSM. But I’m saying it could integrate certain aspects if it will make the college better. Just because you adopt one characteristic doesn’t mean you do everything HYPSM does. For example, say Berkeley adopts MIT’s policy of giving all students the option of P/NP for the first semester. It doesn’t mean Berkeley has to charge 45,000 a year and it doesn’t mean Berkeley has to accept 6,000 students. That’s a logical fallacy.

Sigh, we’ve talked about this over and over, and I really don’t want to keep repeating myself. You can look at the thread “Berkeley bashing” and see for yourself.

Well, you don’t know that. Maybe the kid from the ghetto happened to have a bunch of classmates who honestly don’t care about education and did horribly, while the kid from the suburbs came from a competitive high school in which everyone works really hard. How fair is it that that kid who worked so hard in a competitive environment gets rejected just because another kid is from the ghetto? I mean, I’m fine with taking the kid from the ghetto if he’s really qualified. But you can’t just say “Berkeley takes more ghetto kids so it’s better than HYPSM.” That doesn’t make much sense to me. I think that Berkeley does give more opportunity than HYPSM in accepting disadvantaged students, because it’s easier to get in Berkeley, and that’s great, but I think the propaganda goes too far. The really smart disadvantaged students can get into HYPSM, and the not as smart disadvantaged students can get in a CC (much cheaper) and transfer.

That’s what the quote wants you to think, and that’s why I disagree with it. The fact is, often it’s cheaper to go to a private because they are so generous with financial aid. Now, I think it’s great that Berkeley is cheaper for many Californians, but I think Berkeley can be even better while still offering the same low tuition and accept about 20,000 + students. Wouldn’t that be even better? I want to see Berkeley improve without giving up what makes Berkeley Berkeley: low tuition and accepting many students.

sasmvp · July 23, 2006, 10:14pm

I am sitting here reading (more like skimming) the responses to the article and again find myself smiling. Call me sappy, but I appreciate the intellectual prowess of Berkeley students. This is the environment I hoped for so long to be immersed in, and come Aug 20th, that hope becomes reality.

On other, non-Hallmarky notes, I got a DVD in the mail recently from the Cal Alumni Association and in it there is a discussion about finances as compared to elite private schools. Cal has a student contribution of about 8500, no matter what level of economic status (according to the dvd). This is very high in comparrison to Harvard and Princeton, 3500 and 4500, respectively. So I’m not convinced we are the best place for low-income students. Private schools, which pick up a greater portion of student contribution, are doing the best to educate low income students.

DRab · July 23, 2006, 10:56pm

What is grade inflation? If looking at the words, it is a trend of a rising average GPA. This has occurred at Berkeley over the years. It has happened, with a current average of about 3.25, but because this is just barely above the country average (3.2) and far behind other schools people talk about when talking about Berkeley (Harvard, Stanford, Brown, Princeton, all around 3.5-3.65, although Princeton will probably drop somewhat due to their new policy), it looks unimpressive. The truth is there is some grade inflation at Berkeley. For years people have complained about grade inflation at Cornell and Chicago. These schools are now about at the same level with regard to average GPAs, at about 3.25. Certain disciplines tend to grade harder than others, as do certain departments, certain professors, and certain GSIs compared to others. Are professors going to give you great grades for doing nothing? Most likely not, especially in certain fields, but generally never. You’ll probably be fine if you work reasonably hard and do the right things (aka prepare for tests, spend some time on papers, etc). What’s your proposed major and current college?

As far as competition goes, I think most of it is just people really devoted to studying. There are some who will mislead or in other ways hurt others to better their chances of doing well. This is sad and often disgusting, and needs to be discouraged. From what I can tell, the competition is, in many (but not all) cases, overblown. For isntance, most of what you hear about EECS is how difficult it is. However, only since being on campus did I hear about how students get together in large groups to do homework and study. The better students help their friends who aren’t doing as well, so even if they will get lower test grades, at least they will do pretty well on homework problems. Some ridiculously competitive people do exist, but are these the majority? From what I can tell, no, however, they are most of what people hear and talk about. I think people know in certain classes that much is on the line, such as in UGBA 10 and ochem, but I think very few people are ridiculously cutthroat, and most just want to do well by studying hard.

sasmvp, I think some private schools are the cheapest place for the most elite low income students, and I think the UC system realizes that. Also, I’m not sure if it’s true, that it’s $8,500 regardless of income, but I could be wrong.

ilovecalifornia · July 24, 2006, 11:56am

whoever said they rather have a kid in the 1 percent at a bad school, than a kid at the 5 percent and a good school is a fool.

you have obviously only experienced on type of school in your life…i’ve experienced both and if the school is honestly bad, no good parent would want that for their kid.

mruncleramos · July 24, 2006, 2:15pm

Correlation is not causality.

Tell me exactly why higher income means that kids will get higher sat scores. I can think of two reasons that people commonly give, and once you give them I’ll tell you why they are wrong.

greatestyen · July 24, 2006, 4:48pm

I think your problem continues to be that you think of “Berkeley” as a centralized political body that can make centralized decisions which will supposedly result in a “better” overall product. But that is very far from the truth about Berkeley’s structural organization.

What you should REALLY be saying is that SECTIONS of “Berkeley” are the ones which CAN “make or break” an undergraduate’s experience. Some sections, notably the Economics department and the CS division, seem to enjoy turning away potential undergraduate students because they simply don’t want to teach them-in spite of the fact that they are able to do so. Other sections, notably most of the humanities departments, seem to enjoy stretching their (very) scarce resources and teaching, mentoring, and advising however many students come to them. So in essence the problem here are the self-impacted departments which “Berkeley” has, not Berkeley itself.

liferunsby · July 24, 2006, 11:59pm

Hmm well I’ll probably give two terribly wrong reasons here, but I’ll try my best anyway:

Kids who have higher income families get higher SAT scores because:

<ol>
<li>Schools are generally of better quality in their living areas, so they experience a generally better education than those living in the inner city areas. Better overall education means a firmer grasp of essential skills needed to excel on the SAT (most importantly, reading comprehension IMO).</li>
<li>At better quality schools, there is a more academically competitive and aware enivronment; for example, the kid’s peers will all know what the SAT really takes for truly high scores, such as prep books and Princeton Review or Kaplan SAT courses. Kids in lower income families are focused so much on just meeting the monthly rent, they have no time to concern themselves with whether Johnny scores 80 points higher on the Math section.</li>
</ol>

Now, am I wrong? I probably overlooked something, lol.

adamboy87 · July 25, 2006, 12:10am

I’ll give my input on the SAT thing…
I dont have the website, but i had a speaker in my ethnic studies class last year that gave us this info…
That section on the SAT that is not graded, but is used to make new questions for future test, that questions that are chosen for the future SATs were answered correctly by students who come from areas that have better income. The questions that are not chosen are the ones that are answered wrong the most by the students in these areas. It is also true, according to the speaker, that students from underprivileged schools incorrectly answer the questions that are chosen for the future tests.

I dont know if this makes sense, but thats the best way I can explain it. And again, I heard this from a speaker in my class, she has proof, but i havent looked on the internet for it.

eudean · July 25, 2006, 12:54am

How would that improve education?

I think the general public has common sense. You don’t need to look up enrollment trends to realize that increasing the Berkeley population 5% faster than we increase other resources would be a bad idea. You think such policies wouldn’t be published? The general public I know is a little uninformed, but not stupid.

If what you were saying was true, it would make perfect sense politically to overcrowd high schools and colleges as much as possible. That doesn’t happen, though. Go ask some people what they think make a solid educational institution. Almost none will say having lots of students. Almost all will say small class sizes and solid professors.

Yeah, because never once have you brought up a reasonable point. Do so.

Because the ghetto kid was the best one out of every hundred students from where s/he’s from, and the rich kid was the best out of every 5 from where s/he’s from. I’m not saying that, given two equally qualified students from two economic backgrounds, we should always take the poorer of the two. I’m saying that someone in the top 1% of the ghetto has a good shot of being better than someone in the top 5% of the wealthy, because it’s harder to be better than 99 other people, even if you didn’t take 10 AP classes, than it is to be better than 95 other people.

There are exceptions, naturally, but I’d say it’s the exception that you could find an entire high school of students that weren’t competitive, not the rule.

Tell me how! I want to know. Make classes unimpacted? Use P/NP the first year? These don’t make education better. Hire more nobel laureates? I’m right with you. Enforce higher standards for teaching? More quality of teaching awards? Right on! Fix the equipment in the EE105 lab? Sure, great, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.

See how easy it is to come up with valid complaints? Concrete things that will improve Berkeley are everywhere. You pick the mundane ones to complain about for no reason except HYPSM are using them.

vicissitudes · July 25, 2006, 1:36am

I just use Berkeley because it’s tiresome to say “I think certain departments in Berkeley, like the economics department and the college of engineering, can change certain policies that would make Berkeley a better undergrad experience for some students affected by the above policies” over and over again.

I didn’t say it would improve education. That was just an example to show that Berkeley can do some things like HYPSM and not “charge $45,000 a year.”

Yes it would be a bad idea, and the public would realize this, but the public probably wouldn’t bother thinking so far. When you say “let’s take in 5% more students, many from disadvantaged communities,” people generally wouldn’t start thinking “but wait, would resources also increase by that increment? If not then that might not be such a good idea.” The public could come up with that conclusion, but doesn’t generally think in that direction.

Actually it is happening. Look at the public schools: the ones that are funded by taxpayers and are most vulnerable to the public opinion. They are generally huge compared to the private schools. The public cares that “education is given to many” more than whether Berkeley is better than a few east coast schools or not.

Really? Why don’t you go to those threads and dispute the complaints we listed then? Instead of coming to ANOTHER thread to discuss the SAME THING?

So if the 99 people are all slackers, while the 95 other people are all very intelligent and hard working, it’s still harder? You have to think in context of the competition. That’s why colleges care if you attended a very competitive high school.

What if one school has 10 very smart, hardworking students, and 89 pretty smart students, and one kid ranked 5, while in another school there are 99 pretty smart students, and another kid is ranked 1? In this case being better than 95 students is in fact harder than being better than 99 students, because even #6, 7, 8, 9 can beat the #1 at the second school. And this is something that happens all the time.

Really? Making classes unimpacted doesn’t make your education better? So, if I allowed you to major in an area you like, instead of forcing to major in another area you don’t like, that doesn’t improve your education?

If you think what we talk about is so mundane, then why don’t you come up with some better complaints and better ideas to solve them? I would be more than happy to hear about them.

sakky · July 25, 2006, 11:09pm

Yet isn’t it ironic in the extreme that Berkeley doesn’t try to reduce its class sizes? Take a look at Chem1A, Chem3AB, Physics 7, Math 1AB, EE 40, CS 61A, Bio1AB, Econ 1, PoliSci1 , Busad10, etc. They’re huge! If the public believes that small class sizes are desirable, then shouldn’t the public be pushing Berkeley to reduce them?

questioningbear · July 26, 2006, 12:38am

US news ranking based discussions are so lame.

vicissitudes · July 26, 2006, 1:13am

Actually, this discussion is based on an article in TheBerkeleyNews, in the very first post. And if you think it is lame, then don’t participate.

CalX · July 26, 2006, 6:10pm

Come on sakky, those classes are big because they are basic prerequisites for most science, engineering and soc science majors. Thousands of Cal students must take them every year. The point is the rest of the classes aren’t too big.

I don’t think the teaching approach in those classes is fundamently flawed either, the lecture/discussion format works well because the content in those intro classes is somewhat basic and standard. I’ve had a great profs for phys7, math 1 and EE40 (which wasn’t too big a class actually)

I think the EECS is big enough at Cal. There are negative qualitative effects and diseconomies to scale in making it any bigger than it already is.

eudean · July 26, 2006, 11:06pm

Yes, they should! Smaller class sizes are a good thing, definitely, and if it’s within Berkeley’s budget, we should offer smaller classes. I can respect CalX’s view, and I partially agree that it isn’t too important because the real meaty classes are relatively small. If we’ve got the money and can find qualified professors, there’s no disadvantage to having smaller class sizes.

Huge does not mean overcrowded. The Siberia is huge, but it is not overcrowded. Overcrowded means having 70 people in a maximum occupany 50 room, or 70 people in a room with 50 desks.

See, you can’t know that, though. If you’re omniscient, that’s fine, you can make choices like that. If you aren’t, you have to assume a certain level of competitiveness and go with it. It wouldn’t exactly be fair to assume those levels of competitiveness and apply them to two schools unless you had significant outside information. Further, in order for this choice to pan out over large numbers of students, the situation you describe would not just have to happen “all the time”, it would have to happen more often than not.

Yes, you’ve improved the education of one student. Now all the other 500 students that were already in that department have received a worse education. Kudos to your education plan. If you can support having extra students without degrading quality of education, that’s great, and impacted majors are bad. If you can’t, impacted majors are good. If you want to claim that Berkeley could have no impacted majors while maintaining its current quality of education, fine, but support your claim. But the choice is obvious in that case.

I have before. Require HKN-like professor ratings across all departments. Fix EE105 lab equipment. Higher standards for English-speaking for GSIs (only necessary for those that teach, though). Make open all past course websites (many EECS ones are locked–I know this is an issue individual professors control, but perhaps the department could strike a deal to put in the public domain any files on a class website). This is all easy stuff that’s practically guaranteed to make education better.

DRab · July 27, 2006, 12:01am

What does this mean?

What advantages does this give?

sakky · July 27, 2006, 4:01am

I’m merely pointing out the the public wants smaller K-12 class sizes, yet the same public doesn’t push for smaller classes at Berkeley. I, like eudean, find that to be an interesting paradox.

Eudean, we finally find something we can agree on.

Actually, I think you can indeed have this, as I have discussed on other threads. I strongly suspect there really are majors out there that have a lot of slack capacity that could be redirected. A lot of the math profs, for example, could be teaching EECS courses, thereby expanding EECS capacity.

I mean, seriously, take a look at Math 118 (Wavelets and Signal Processing). Honestly, isn’t this really an EECS class (and specifically, a signal processing class)? Heck, the website for the class is even hosted on the CS server. So why isn’t this class taught (or cross-listed) as an EECS class?

<a href=“http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~oholtz/118/intro118.pdf[/url]”>http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~oholtz/118/intro118.pdf</a>

Or take EECS 126 (Probability and Random Processes). Come on now, seriously, isn’t this really a math course? I’m sure you can find somebody in the Math department, or maybe the statistics department, who could teach this course. Take a look at the catalog description and I defy you to tell me that this isn’t really a math course.

<a href=“http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_sends_request?p_dept_name=ELECTRICAL+ENGINEERING&p_dept_cd=EL+ENG&p_title=&p_number=126[/url]”>http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_sends_request?p_dept_name=ELECTRICAL+ENGINEERING&p_dept_cd=EL+ENG&p_title=&p_number=126</a>

Or take the CS classes on algorithms. Come on, these are basically math classes. Mathematicians have been investigating algorithms for thousands of years, and many of today’s best algorithm researcheres in the world are basically mathematicians. So why can’t the CS algorithm classes be taught by math profs? They do that at MIT all the time (the algorithm courses are crosslisted between EECS and Math) , so why can’t they do that at Berkeley?

The same could be said for the electromagnetics classes. Compare EE 117 to Physics 110. I mean, seriously, are these classes really that different? I really don’t think so. What that means is that a physics prof could reasonably teach EE 117. In fact, there may ultimately be an opportunity to merge these classes together.

<a href=“http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_sends_request?p_dept_name=PHYSICS&p_dept_cd=PHYSICS&p_title=&p_number=110A[/url]”>http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_sends_request?p_dept_name=PHYSICS&p_dept_cd=PHYSICS&p_title=&p_number=110A</a>

<a href=“http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_sends_request?p_dept_name=ELECTRICAL+ENGINEERING&p_dept_cd=EL+ENG&p_title=&p_number=117[/url]”>http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_sends_request?p_dept_name=ELECTRICAL+ENGINEERING&p_dept_cd=EL+ENG&p_title=&p_number=117</a>

DRab · July 28, 2006, 2:13am

Maybe the public is smart enough to realize the benefits and utility of having a limited number of very, very large courses?

vicissitudes · July 28, 2006, 3:24am

Well, apparently we don’t even “have enough money and professors” to make all majors open to all students.

Uhh…haha. Are you serious? When I said huge I obviously meant size of the student population, and huge population does in fact attribute to overcrowding, especially when the public campuses aren’t exactly huge themselves.

Of course you can! Colleges know which high schools are competitive and which high schools are not. They have regional officers who are hired to find out about these things. And, the competitiveness of high schools usually remains stagnant from year to year. You can find tons of pairs of high schools in which the entire top 5% of one is stronger than the top 1% of another.

Well, sakky already explained this but I’ll go further. Even if you can’t, how much will it really degrade the education of the 500 to allow one student? The answer is probably very very little. I’ll give an example: consider 501 students. 500 students are well-fed and 1 goes hungry. Now, if each student contributes 1 cent so that the hungry student can buy some food, would that be so bad? Sure 500 students are “worse off” but surely you can see how this situation is better than the former.

sakky · July 28, 2006, 4:23am

Personally, I think the way to solve this problem is to do something that I proposed awhile back and that would also improve one of the things I want to see improved (that being the overall quality of the students) which is to simply do a datamining experience to examine what high schools or what community colleges tend to produce a disproportionate number of people who come to Berkeley and flunk out, and then admit fewer people from those high schools or community colleges. Obviously you would have to normalize the data for the difficulty of the Berkeley majors they choose (because certain majors like engineering are far easier to flunk out of than other majors), as well as other factors that might affect flunkout rates, such as economic status. But that’s a relatively simple thing for a computer program to do. After all, that’s what computers are for - to compute. After washing all those other variables out, you then look to see which high schools and CC’s seem to be sending an unusually high number of students to Berkeley who do badly, and just admit fewer of them, and in turn admit more students from schools that seem to be doing a good job of preparing their students for Berkeley.

In other words, this is basic statistical dynamic scoring. Why admit students who are going to flunk out? It’s bad for Berkeley and, frankly, it’s bad for those students too. Those students should be going to a school where they can actually succeed. Berkeley is doing no favors to these students by bringing them in, only to flunk them out later. You’re just wasting everybody’s time and money by doing that.

Undergraduate admissions VIP: "Berkeley is not Harvard"

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