<p>I've come across so many transfers in my classes and the vast majority are far undeserving/ do not even seem qualified enough to be here?</p>
<p>Has the admissions office lowered their standards THAT much?
What kind of kids are they letting in?</p>
<p>I really think this is going to be very detrimental to the prestige and academic quality of the student body. It is deteriorating it by being so unselective when it comes to transfers, it's ridiculous. is the applicant pool from other colleges and community colleges that bad?</p>
<p>yes, i am a junior transfer for fall 2010 and i am VERY subpar and undeserving. i got accepted to haas even though i’m really stupid. my goal is to tarnish the reputation of uc berkeley for all eternity</p>
<p>the basis of admission for community college transfers is not exactly as rigorous as freshmen admits. And the fact that so many are allowed in even though community college which is known to be very easy does devalue the sacrifice and commitment that high school kids put in…besides that, transfers don’t have to take any standardized exams because their admission is based solely on grades (which is not exactly the most level playing field).</p>
<p>I knew a couple that transferred in and in high school they were bottom of the barrel (the HUGE partiers/the dumb ditzy blonde/the crackhead or the flat out druggies.) I can’t believe some of the people that cal admits as transfers. I really think they should step up their selectiveness a couple of notches.</p>
<p>as a transfer i agree with everything anonymoususername said. i think utilizing SAT/ACT scores would be a good idea. Many private schools ask for them and i think it’d be a good way to gauge the applicants.</p>
<p>wow. why did you post this again? this stupid kid in my class made a comment about how he’s a “conservative ass” in my class today…it’s like why do you bother saying **** that will tick people off then?</p>
<p>what are you talking about? This is my first time posting this because I’m incredibly frustrated by the low standards set by Cal when it comes to transfers. Is it because they don’t always meet their transfer enrollment quota so they’re forced to take in alot of “fillers”?</p>
<p>I don’t know, I’ve run into quite a few “subpar” students who started day one at Cal. But who cares, the whole point is that there is diversity in a public school, and even those who are supposedly “subpar” have something to contribute to the overall experience, no matter where they started college. </p>
<p>By the way, this sentence is not a question:</p>
<p>“I’ve come across so many transfers in my classes and the vast majority are far undeserving/ do not even seem qualified enough to be here?”</p>
<p>(Yes, pedantic, I know. Sorry, I’m just a lowly transfer student.)</p>
<p>i’m not saying that all of them are subpar, just that the standards for admission should be stricter so that they “best of the best” shine through more clearly. There are some brilliant transfers who didn’t go to cc out of financial difficulties, some just didn’t mature early enough (academically) and didn’t know what they were/are capable of until they got to cc. </p>
<p>…come on guys…it’s admission day! what’s the point in all this negativity?</p>
<p>Awww come on, diversity is not the goal of admission. For selective schools that only consider competitive students, performance and understanding of concepts is the goal. That way, they will be able to keep up and learn in an academic environment like Cal.</p>
<p>Some of the best students I know are transfers and there are tons of sub-par freshmen here too. From the numbers, transfer students don’t do as well as four-year students and the GPA gap seems to be about ~0.5+/-0.3 (I know that’s pretty rough), so if you wanted to make an overarching statement about transfer students being academically less qualified, you would be correct.</p>
<p>However, I think that some of the accomplishments of transfer students are so impressive compared to those of the many mediocre four-year students that is pretty demeaning to discount all transfers in a sweeping statement.</p>
<p>This isn’t entirely a problem with the transfer admissions committee’s decisions. Ignoring the transfers who chose a community college for financial reasons or lack of motivation in high school but have great potential, it’s reality that some went to community college because they just don’t perform as well academically. It’s just a fact that overall the high school applicant pool has more strong students than the transfer applicant pool does. Add that to the fact that transfer students need to get into a four-year college, and it works out that admissions has to accept less-qualified students from community colleges.</p>
<p>What is a problem is that admissions committees are accepting sub-par students in general, both for four-year and transfer admissions. Obviously their definition of a better student differs from my definition, but I feel that better students often get rejected in lieu of weaker ones.
This is another problem. There are some community colleges that offer some courses that rival the difficulty of even Berkeley’s, and it wouldn’t be grossly incorrect to rank them above the lower UCs. On the other hand there are CCs that are easier than high school. There’s too much emphasis on grades given their variance. (This is a problem across the system but fortunately standardized exams normalize things a little.)</p>
<p>So, adding the fact that on average transfer students are less academically qualified to the fact that the admissions committee doesn’t always accept (what I consider to be) the best students of an applicant pool, you will see plenty of sub-par transfers. But it is also important to keep in mind that there will be transfers who will impress you and you shouldn’t make immediate judgments just because of their backgrounds.</p>
<p>People I know complain about the student athletes here being subpar students, though I have encountered intelligent transfers and athletes in my classes.</p>
<p>At least the curve will be all the more generous…?</p>
<p>BSD: Where did you get those numbers for the Berkeley GPA gap? Does Berkeley post them, or did you come up with them on your own? </p>
<p>The transfer students I know just don’t fit the profiles that have been conjured up by this post. One is a 2010 HAAS Scholar, one will be attending Oxford for grad school next year (and she won a fairly prestigious fellowship for research last summer), several of us will be attending LSE or another graduate school, and I’m pretty sure most of us are carrying a 3.8+ Berkeley GPA. </p>
<p>At any rate, I’m constantly impressed by the students at Berkeley. I don’t really think anyone has to worry about the prestige of the school dropping just because there are some mediocre four-years, transfers, athletes, and frat boys/rejected Haas applicants in class. ;)</p>
<p>I have A’s in all my math and science classes at community college and I got a 790 on the SAT math and the SAT 2 Math 2. I’m definitely qualified for Applied Math at Berkeley so I’m not concerned by this thread.</p>
<p>My friend who got an 800 on math and physics got his ass handed to himself by Math 1A. Berkeley math is like 1000 times harder than CC/SAT math.</p>