<p>How true is this? My professor told me, a classmate that went to Cal said the same. Or that the really large impersonal classes are taught by professors.</p>
<p>My GSI says its dispel.</p>
<p>/grr</p>
<p>Oops, I'm sorry. I knew that. It was definitely a typo. Yes, it is dispel..uhh..my bad. </p>
<p>Your GSI must have forgotten to tell you to end with a period.</p>
<p>Just look at the schedule. There are short large lectures, followed by longer smaller GSI discussions.</p>
<p>Ducky Dodger:
Haahaa! No love lost.</p>
<p>GSI's generally lead the discussion and the lab sections for the classes. I have not yet had a class taught exclusively by a GSI, it has been 3 years. </p>
<p>It might be different for the humanities but it hasn't been my experience in MCB.</p>
<p>GSIs teach the lower division Latin classes, I know -- both Latin 1 and Latin 2 were taught exclusively by a graduate student, not a single professor in sight.</p>
<p>However, every single other one of my classes has been taught by a professor. They may have a GSI helping, but the most they've done in lecture is cover class when the prof is unexpectedly absent (and that's only happened once).</p>
<p>Lower division language classes are almost all taught by GSIs or non-professor instructors. Even many upper division language classes are taught by GSIs. GSIs also teach many summer school courses.</p>
<p>Almost all other courses at Berkeley are structured with lecture by the professor and then sections led by a GSI. GSIs also do almost all the grading at Berkeley. You can spend 4 years at Berkeley and never once have a professor look at your work. This is a downside of the GSI system.</p>
<p>Psychology Major here:</p>
<p>You go into a large auditorium where a professor will lecture for an hour, three times a week. Then you have one hour in a small class of 15-25 students taught by a Graduate Student Instructor, a GSI. They all have different styles of teaching: either lecturing or being lazy and allowing discussion. They will be the people in charge of grading you. </p>
<p>You have the biggest chance to shine in these small GSI taught classes. They will be the people that put in the good word for you if you want to get recommendations from your professor for graduate admissions, scholarships, and labs you may want to intern at. Your other option is to blatantly go into professor hours and suck-up: name dropping and off-handedly mentioning your accomplishments and interests. This way, you can avoid participating in class (but why would you...shy?).</p>
<p>Are the discussion sessions compulsory? How long is the typical course?
I also heard the curves are ridiculous. At my current school, 90+ is an A, 80-89 is a B, etc. Is there no such standard at Berkeley? I was told that classmates set the grading curve.</p>
<p>^ If you are in a non-humanities class, you compete with your classmates. For most of my classes, about 15-20% get As/A-s, 20-30% get Bs, rest get Cs, very few get below Cs.</p>
<p>The discussion classes, like the lecture, are generally not compulsory (language courses are compulsory). BUT, you don't attend a discussion class, it can and most likely will affect your grade.</p>