Berkeley undergraduate rankings...?????

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>I'm a high school senior who is most likely attending Cal this fall.</p>

<p>I do like the school a lot, but originally I was looking for schools with more undergraduate focus and smaller size (mostly private). However, I wasn't accepted to the private schools that I wanted, and Berkeley seemed like a good choice as I'll most likely major in EECS. </p>

<p>I know that Berkeley is probably one of the best if not the best in the nation for graduate education, but that lots of people complain that its undergraduate programs do not match the quality of its graduate programs, since it is too research-centric, too large classes, etc. </p>

<p>And today, I was looking at the "Best undergraduate teaching" rankings from US News (I don't really give much credibility to the rankings, but thought this was interesting nonetheless)</p>

<p>The rankings state that: </p>

<p>"Many colleges have a strong commitment to teaching undergraduates instead of graduate-level research. The schools on these lists are noted by college administrators as paying a particular focus on undergraduate teaching. </p>

<ol>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Miami University</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Notre Dame</li>
<li>William and Mary</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Berkeley</li>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>UVA</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Yale
....</li>
</ol>

<p>I found the rankings very strange; I was pretty sure that Dartmouth and Princeton would top the list, and Brown and Yale too, but it seems weird that Berkeley is tied with Brown in undergraduate teaching and above Yale.</p>

<p>Now, I know that Cal's undergraduate programs are pretty good. But a "particular focus on undergraduate teaching" and "strong commitment to teaching undergraduates instead of graduate-level research" don't really match the impression of Cal I got from what I've read and other people who attended there.</p>

<p>The methodology of the ranking states that it is entirely based on peer survey... and I still find it pretty strange. What are your opinions on this? As a prospective freshman I'm quite surprised to know that Berkeley undergraduate is more well-regarded than I previously thought. Is it just overrated? or is it actually that good?</p>

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<p>This seems pretty strange to me as well. haha</p>

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<p>People who want to hate on Berkeley try to attack the undergraduate teaching. It’s not actually bad at all. I posted this earlier:</p>

<p>Ratemyprofessor.com average professor ratings</p>

<p>Berkeley: 3.37
Harvard: 2.95
Stanford: 3.0
Princeton: 2.85
Yale: 2.59
UCLA: 2.91
MIT: 2.33 </p>

<p>In my experience here, I’ve had a few bad teachers but a lot of amazing ones as well. It also gets better when you take upper divs. I have 5 professors this semester and they are all great teachers and pretty inspirational people. I think most people feel the same way.</p>

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<p>Lol research-centric is really not a bad thing, as you’ll find out when you’re desperately trying to pad your resume for job applications. :D</p>

<p>And you know, most of the professors are pretty good. They know their stuff, they’re passionate about the subject, and they generally know how to teach.</p>

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<p>So these rankings probably score on things like number of faculty per student or number of students per class, which Berkeley FAILS at. Berkeley is a public university, so classes will be large and you get less individual attention from counsellors who will help you through the system.</p>

<p>That said, Berkeley professors tend to be at the top of their field. They are very knowledgeable on the subject that they are teaching. Unfortunately, some professors at Berkeley are worse at teaching than others, but Berkeley tends to have very good educators and overall you get a very good education.</p>

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<p>flutterfly: Just have to point something out. You used RateMyProfessor to judge how UCLA students feel about their teachers, but UCLA students don’t use RateMyProfessor. We have our own website called BruinWalk that everyone uses. There is probably an incredibly limited amount of data for UCLA on RateMyProfessor, so it’s not really relevant or accurate.</p>

<p>Side-note, but worth pointing out. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other schools named also have their own websites. I’m not sure RateMyProfessor is a great comparison tool when used as such.</p>

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<p>Totally agree with ya. Not to mention anyone can go onto ratemyproffesor and write reviews even if they don’t attend the particular school. I find it interesting that the CC I attend has a higher average ranking of professors than any of the schools mentioned above (many people use ratemyproffesors at the CC I attend).</p>

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<p>I agree with the above sentiment. The rating of professors is often done relative to other scores people see. It may be that students at certain schools have higher expectations of their professors than students at Berkeley. I would not use ratemyprofessor ratings to compare schools.</p>

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<p>Just because Berkeley professors are focused on their research more than their teaching does NOT mean that they aren’t brilliant teachers as well…The perfect examples are Martin Head-Gordon and Denis Auroux (who is on leave from MIT, admittedly). These two are among the BEST researchers in their respective fields in the entire world, yet their teaching is outstandingly amazing. </p>

<p>Taking their classes (Chem 4A and Math 53) in my first semester here at Berkeley has pretty much changed my life forever, and therefore I don’t think it’s fair to say that all professors here can’t teach. It’s true that it’s hard to interact with professors one-on-one, as there are 500 kids in all of the classes, but that’s a different issue (not even really an issue in science classes). All of my friends are generally very happy with the teaching of most of our professors (with a few exceptions, but I’m sure there are bad teachers everywhere).</p>

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<p>Yes I know ratemyprofessor isn’t a perfect ranking, but you can’t completely disregard it either. Can you come up with a decent hypothesis for why those rankings would be so biased in Berkeley’s favor? No one in the other thread could.</p>

<p>Oh and most Berkeley students use courserank over ratemyprofessor now too. You can check but I think both Berkeley and UCLA have at least a couple hundred rankings on the site.</p>

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<p>You certainly should completely disregard RateMyProfessor for UCLA. All students use BruinWalk. It’s not like it has a slight advantage over RateMyProfessor. It probably has at least 20 times or so as many reviewers from UCLA. For example, if I look up a few of my teachers…</p>

<p>Paul Eggert:
63 reviews on BruinWalk
2 reviews on RateMyProfessor</p>

<p>Scott Bartchy:
90 reviews on BruinWalk
8 reviews on RateMyProfessor</p>

<p>…you can see where I’m getting at.</p>

<p>I would suggest completely ignoring RateMyProfessor for UCLA, and other schools that have their own evaluation system. There just aren’t enough users from that school to be significant. If you could glean some data off of BruinWalk though, that would have significance.</p>

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<p>having taken statistics, i support flutterfly’s analysis</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>i’ve taken stats. ~10 or 20 data points are not significant, but hundreds PRETTY DAMN ARE.</p>

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</p>

<p>there is no where near enough bad data (ie people from another school purposely writing a bad review) to skew the overall average</p>

<p>please note that this is an objective analysis, correct me if my math or logic is wrong</p>

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<p>bump… any more opinions?</p>