<p>difficult? high school was harder</p>
<p>it's hard in balancing your time. yes. <em>tells self to stop watching nba playoffs</em> know how to party hard and study hard and you win.</p>
<p>yes, is it quite a bit more than science/engineering classes. thats one of the reasons why many people in that major poke fun at humanities majors, since its difficult to get an A period. 50% is about twice as many a's as science/math courses give out, and at the 50th percentile in these classes, the grade is probably a B-</p>
<p>so you can see that majors have to put in a lot more work for the same gpa</p>
<p>So is the workload just really big, is the subject matter really difficult, or is it that everyone else is really competitive? Or is it some combination of all 3? Of those 3 areas, which is the hardest to deal with?</p>
<p>from what I have read on the forums, it seems that the workload is big because many do their homework right before they are due (too much freedom = more free time)</p>
<p>you do your homework?</p>
<p>*** theres hw in college</p>
<p>As an actual Berkeley student, I'd love to see some statistics backing up the statement that A's are given to 50% of students in humanities classes. We need to purge this thread of that kind of bull right now. Believe me, grad student instructors do not grade that easily in some of the more intellectual majors. If you want an A on a philosophy paper, it had better be a good paper. A philosophy GSI that I had last semester actually showed me the grade distribution on the final for a particular class, and the median was somewhere in the mid 80s. I had one of the two high As on that final. So don't give me a bunch of unsubstantiated junk about "50% A's."</p>
<p>Are the humanities pretty competitive, then?</p>
<p>h***, I too am going to have to disagree with you assesment that humanities classes are easier. Easier is subjective. Most people who take math/science majors are very interested in math and science, so those classes will be considerably "easier" than if an english or philosophy major took the same class. And vice versa. But I will repeat something I said in another thread, and that is that most humanities students have to read ridiculously large quantities of material just to stay afloat. If reading 200-250 pages of Milton, Socrates, etc seems easy to you, then you will ace all those classes.</p>
<p>That's weird, all I wrote was h***.</p>
<p>What!!!? Ok, I was addressing the person whose handle is h, w, t, f</p>
<p>Then is there a difference in class sizes? Since it seems that most people at Cal major in maths or sciences, so are the classes in the humanities smaller?</p>
<p>Most people do not major in maths and sciences. Its not mit. The class sizes for pretty much high in every lower divison class , but once you get into upper division stuff the class sizes drop very, very dramatically. Like from 700 students to 15.</p>
<p>conor, i was taking it objectively. there are more A's given out in humanities classes than math/science classes</p>
<p>Show me stats.</p>
<p>700 students? Are there really classes that big?!?</p>
<p>"This collective surge in GPA peaked last fall when 85 percent of grades given for all undergraduate courses were a B- or higher, according to data complied by the university."</p>
<p>" At UC Berkeley, almost half the grades given for undergraduate courses are As, according to UC Berkeley data."</p>
<p>since math/science courses give out fewer than 25% a's, we can conclude that other courses give out more than 50% a's</p>
<p><a href="http://dailycal.org/article.php?id=17051%5B/url%5D">http://dailycal.org/article.php?id=17051</a></p>
<p>THe avg GPA at Cal is about 3.0, which is less than Stanford's 3.4 or Harvard's 3.38.</p>
<p>its actually 3.2</p>
<p>"Easier is subjective. Most people who take math/science majors are very interested in math and science, so those classes will be considerably "easier" than if an english or philosophy major took the same class. And vice versa."</p>
<p>Not quite true harder to believe an english major is just as likely to do well in an upper level science course than a science major in any humanities course. Theres alot more leeway i humanities, in science your either right or wrong(2+2always =4)</p>