<p>I heard this saying on Cal Day, especially in the CS department. Does it hold any validity?</p>
<p>Yes (it would be more accurate to say that a B at Berkeley is an A- at Stanford)
Especially in the CS department.</p>
<p>Source: One of my parents and a sibling, both Stanford CS alumni, and a friend at Berkeley who told me that a professor who had taught at Stanford and Berkeley admitted that the people getting B’s would have gotten A’s at Stanford (total hearsay, I know)</p>
<p>Even with all the rivalries and trash talks between each other, only 'furd knows that we’re also a legitimate school. Even though we tend to get lower grades, I don’t think the rest of the world outside of the Bay area is that aware or even care…</p>
<p>Would you guys say that the harsher grading and greater workload at Berkeley, specifically in the CS department, helps us master the material to a greater degree? That is, does it make us smarter and better students?</p>
<p>Not at all. Students in CS at both end up of equal caliber. This whole “B at Berkeley is an A at Stanford” is hearsay nonsense. See this post:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14479959-post21.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14479959-post21.html</a></p>
<p>Not true sorry</p>
<p>This statement has merit if you can look at grade distributions in a class and show that Stanford awards As disproportionately compared to Berkeley after eliminating the bias for caliber of the students.</p>
<p>Yes, most of Berkeley’s hard classes give B’s to students who would have gotten A’s at Stanford. I think most grad schools and employers realize this and don’t pay attention to grades of students at those schools.</p>
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<p>Exactly - there’s a reason that as universities (including Berkeley) have gotten more selective over the years, the average GPAs have gotten higher as well. This also explains why today selectivity and average GPA are very highly correlated. One could just as easily reason that the caliber of the students at Stanford would mean they’d get an A at Berkeley if they had gotten a B at Stanford. </p>
<p>See how difficult it is to extrapolate from one to the other? The greater point here is that students at Berkeley and many other schools make themselves feel better by pretending that students at schools like Stanford skate by, with A’s handed out like candy, etc. That’s simply not the case. The grades at more selective schools tend to be higher partly because the students are naturally inclined to work harder. There’s also a higher concentration of natural talent and ability. (This is not to say that Berkeley does not have plenty of such students, just that the student body is not nearly as uniform in this respect.)</p>
<p>For example, take CSU-Fresno, a school that is much less selective than Berkeley. In 2006 its average GPA was 2.84, versus Berkeley’s 3.27 - a full .43 difference (in fact, the difference here is larger than the difference between Berkeley and HYPS). So CSU-Fresno students can just say, “a B here would’ve been an A at Berkeley.” Right, flutterfly_28?</p>
<p>Not sure if comparing Berkeley to Fresno State is a fair comparison for the reasons you mentioned above regarding hard work ethic and natural talent.</p>
<p>What we’re really interested in is not the overall GPA, but simply “what are we getting for the effort we put in” and “would we get a better result (grade) for the same amount work at another school”?</p>
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<p>That’s exactly the point. CSU-Fresno isn’t nearly as selective as Berkeley; it helps to show you how selectivity influences the success (measured by average GPA) in college. There’s a direct correlation; if you look at gradeinflation.com, you’ll find this is nearly always true. Of course, there are some CSU-Fresno students who have the work ethic and natural talent of some Berkeley students, but the former is not as uniform. The same can be said of Berkeley and Stanford.</p>
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<p>That’s right, and such is nearly impossible to measure, much less compare when you haven’t attended both schools as an undergrad. Yet many Berkeley students, on this thread and others, feel perfectly comfortable making such claims. This absurdity is part of the Berkeley lore: it’s ingrained in every Berkeley student that Stanford students have it easy.</p>
<p>You’d think that Stanford students, who are easily among the hardest-working/most intelligent students in the country, would find their classes easy. But for whatever reason, they struggle immensely, undergo sleep deprivation, stress about exams and papers, etc. (Ever heard of the ‘duck syndrome’?) If Stanford were so easy, why is this the case? They’d just all be getting A’s; but they don’t. B’s can even be hard to come by.</p>
<p>The point is that the claims of people like flutterfly_28 and terenc are unfounded.</p>
<p>Well, I do believe the work ethic and natural talent for Berkeley and the Farm students are about equal and both are the hardest-working and most intelligent students in the country. We don’t have it easy and they (most likely) don’t have it easy either.</p>
<p>Although I have to say the option to switch the grade to pass/no pass the day before the final exam and relatively small class size and other policies here and there do promote a slightly less pressured atmosphere at the Farm which affects the academic performance.</p>
<p>Of course, the only way to find out is ask professors who taught at both schools…</p>
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<p>I’d say that some students at Berkeley are stronger in work ethic/natural talent than some students at Stanford, and vice versa. But I would say that the latter is, on average, stronger in that; as I said before, it’s more uniform. </p>
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<p>That’s not true. The deadline for change of grading basis is the 7th or 8th week (which is the withdrawal deadline). I’ve noticed that Berkeley students often have this very outdated view of Stanford’s academic calendar, e.g. that students can change the grading basis or drop the class all the way up to the final exam. That hasn’t been the case for at least 15 years. The drop deadline is at the end of the third week. If you don’t withdraw by the withdraw deadline, you have to finish the class (or take a bad grade).</p>
<p>It’s true that the more flexible calendar structure puts less pressure on students, but I think that’s more Berkeley’s problem than Stanford’s luxury. It’s already an administrative headache just getting students into classes at Berkeley (with multiple phases, different priorities, etc.), and even then students end up on waitlists. Stanford’s size allows it to avoid these problems, but it doesn’t give students free reign. In other words, it’s unnecessary stress that Berkeley has to deal with, given how many undergrads there are.</p>
<p>I also wouldn’t say small classes are necessarily less stressful; if anything, there’s more pressure to perform in class (both in participation and in presentation of projects and papers).</p>
<p>I myself went through administrative headache like signing up for classes I don’t want with very unfavorable times and it does affect your academics.</p>
<p>I don’t want to drag this argument further, but I think the best way to measure grade inflation is not by the number of A’s but by the number/percentage of D’s and F’s. (Professor Hilfinger, oh my!) I won’t say anything more now.</p>
<p>I see why you might assume that Stanford’s students are stronger as a whole - they should be given how selective the school is. Stanford, however, thinks its mission is to promote diversity by focusing heavily on recruiting minorities, athletes, and other “unique” students and then using aggressive affirmative action policies to get them in. They’re very proud of this - I’ve had to sit through speeches by admissions officers about how they’re doing the world a favor by creating a diverse student body.</p>
<p>Point is, their student body is not any more “uniform” than Cal’s. Academically speaking, Cal is probably more uniform since all students have met high academic standards to get in. Imagine what would happen if Stanford implemented the same grading policy as Berkeley. Where on the scale would the minority/athlete/“unique” admits be? Some may be able to catch up, but it would create a pretty obvious grade disparity that would counter the principles of affirmative action. They don’t really have a choice but to inflate grades if they want to claim that their admissions system is working.</p>
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<p>I dearly wish that last sentence was true. Sadly, there seems to be no evidence that that is the case: Stanford students faced with highly-GPA centric criteria such as law school or med-school admissions do not seem to require discernably better grades than do Berkeley students, as demonstrated by old CC threads (which surely somebody here can search). indeed, I believe somebody showed that prelaws from Stanford require essentially the same grades as do Berkeley prelaws to be admitted to even Berkeley Law itself. One would surely think that if any law school ought to understand the grading disparity between Berkeley and Stanford, it would be Berkeley’s own law school. Unfortunately, they either don’t know, or don’t care. </p>
<p>Stanford students are also sadly notably more successful in winning elite post-grad international scholarships that also tend to rely on GPA. Last year Stanford won 5 Rhodes Scholarships, which equals the total number of Rhodes that Berkeley has won since the 1980’s, without even factoring in the disparity in the absolute student populations at both schools. Indeed, some such scholarships specifically state that applicants must meet a certain GPA minimum for them to even apply - the Marshall Scholarship being the most prominent example in specifically requiring a 3.7. If you have a 3.6, you can’t simply argue to the Marshall committee that a ‘B’ at Berkeley is equivalent to an ‘A’ at Stanford or anywhere else. They won’t care; all they’ll see is that you don’t meet their minimum eligibility requirements. I am also unaware of any GPA-disadvantage that Stanford students face when competing for GPA-centric employers such as consulting or banking.</p>
<p>If the notion that a employers/grad-schools understand that a Berkeley B equates to a Stanford A is what people need to tell themselves to help them find inner peace, I suppose that that’s harmless. Unfortunately, there seems to be precious little evidence that supports that notion. </p>
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<p>Well, to be fair, Berkeley admits plenty of athletes as well. According to the NCAA, Stanford boasts of a far higher [Graduation</a> Success Rate](<a href=“http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/newmedia/public/rates/index.html]Graduation”>NCAA Education and Research Data - Graduation Success Rate Redirect) in the two major ‘money’ sports of football and men’s basketball than does Berkeley. Indeed, Berkeley’s GSR in those sports is generally among the worst in the entire conference. We therefore can’t really complain about Stanford admitting supposedly academically underperforming athletes in the name of ‘diversity’ when Berkeley arguably does so at least as much, and perhaps even more so. </p>
<p>Now, regarding other sources of diversity, we ought to keep in mind that Berkeley ‘implicitly’ institutes a version of ‘diversity admissions’ by simply having lower overall admissions standards than Stanford does. Not to be overly harsh, but let’s be frank: while the best students at Berkeley are competitive with any students at any school, let’s face it, the tail-end of the bottom 10-20% of (non-athlete) Berkeley students are not really particularly talented or hard-working. They probably should never have been admitted to Berkeley, and even if they had, they probably shouldn’t have come. Honestly, students who are earning less than a 2.5 GPA - which is what this group generally comprises - would surely have been better off at a school more suited for their capabilities. </p>
<p>So what’s worse: that Stanford admits certain ‘unique’ students who perhaps would have performed poorly under Berkeley’s grading scheme had they gone there, or that Berkeley itself admits students who perform poorly under Berkeley’s grading scheme? I think you could go either way on that question.</p>
<p>What about the obvious? Berkeley is twice the size of Stanford and their EECS department is probably twice as big compared to EECS at Stanford. So if you grade on the curve, you will have a lot more people getting Bs.</p>
<p>Texaspg, actually, that’s not obvious at all. From a purely theoretical standpoint, a curved probability distribution can be fitted to any number of observations. The distribution will fit less well with fewer observations (in that there may be larger ‘residual’ values), but it will still be a distribution. </p>
<p>You can also approach the question from a practical standpoint. Caltech is undoubtedly the smallest of all of the elite PhD-granting engineering schools in the nation. Indeed, more students graduate from the Berkeley EECS undergrad program than from all of Caltech’s majors combined. Would anybody like to try to argue that because of its Lilliputian size, Caltech EE/CS grade curves must therefore be easier than Stanford’s, or even Berkeley’s? </p>
<p>Similarly, MIT - despite its vaunted engineering emphasis - nevertheless has substantially fewer EE/CS students than does Berkeley. Does that then dictate that MIT’s grade curve must be easier than Berkeley’s?</p>
<p>My sense is that actually the opposite is true: while perhaps the top Berkeley CS students would still earn A’s at MIT or Caltech, many Berkeley CS students who are barely passing with near-2.0 GPA’s would flunk out entirely at MIT or Caltech.</p>
<p>What does your sense tell you about how a 2.0 student at MIT or Caltech would do at Cal?</p>
<p>No, all I am saying is that lot more people getting Bs are comparing themselves some people getting an A at Stanford and thinking may be I would have gotten an A there without realizing a B student does not become an A student at a comparable school, only at a less competitive school.</p>