As the title states, does any the numbers for people in L&S CS actually declaring CS as their major since there is the 3.3gpa cap for CS61A/B and 70?
https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/department/SP/2016/53 indicates that the grade distributions from 2006-2014 indicate the following percentages of B+ or higher grades:
50% of 6,363 grades in CS 61A
59% of 3,675 grades in CS 61B
46% of 3,665 grades in CS 70
However, this combines both L&S and EECS students, and others who may be taking the courses for some reason other than for the L&S CS or EECS majors. There also appears to be significant attrition after CS 61A, due to smaller enrollment in CS 61B and 70.
https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2015Majors indicates that there were 330 L&S CS and 374 EECS majors graduating for 2015.
@ucbalumnus a lot of people say Berkeley is really hard especially EECS majors. I checked out all the links you provided and more grade distributions for math and EE classes as well. It seems for most classes around 50% of the class get a B+ or higher and usually about 1/3 get an A- or higher. Those distributions seem pretty good to me, is this what people consider “cutthroat”? Or am I misinterpreting the difficulty of these classes?
@TKatana
I think that a lot of difficulty comes not from the curve per se, but from the fact that the classes just require quite a bit of work, and by the time you hit upper-division classes, pretty much everyone is competent enough that you can’t skate to a good grade without really putting in the effort. Even you just want to hit the average and get a B, you’ll have to work for it.
For example, HKN (the EECS honor society) says in their course guide (https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/courseguides) that CS 170 problem sets take 10-15 hours per week, in addition to 3 hours of lecture and 1 of discussion. If everyone works 14-19 hours per week per CS class, then a schedule of three CS classes and a humanities class becomes a bit of a challenge. (Speaking from experience, I would endorse 10-15 hours per week for 170 psets as pretty reasonable).
That being said, I don’t think CS/EECS is in any way “cutthroat”. On the contrary, I spent every week of 170 bouncing algorithm ideas around with a large group of friends in discussion and homework parties, and meeting at the library with a small group later in the week to discuss our final algorithms. Lots of the most difficult classes (Operating Systems and Programming Languages / Compilers, for example) are performed in groups of 3-4. So overall, I think that the culture of EECS isn’t all that cutthroat. But it is hard.