<p>mathboy: You have good points, and I’ll concede that I think entrance tests could be effective in encouraging more rigorous and uniform levels of difficulty amongst community colleges.</p>
<p>In the long term, I think this would work. In the short term, I think this would be unfair to students from crappy community colleges. Sure, they could study extra on their own. Berkeley would therefore need to make the content of their tests very transparent so that these students would know exactly what to study. But they would be disadvantaged by not doing it in class like those at better CC’s. Like I said, scoping out the best CC and having to commute to it is not a realistic option for a lot of students. </p>
<p>So I agree that your plan could be effective. It would take a lot of cooperation amongst community colleges and Berkeley.</p>
<p>Yeah, it’s definitely a little tough to get used to for those who attend less rigorous CCs. But the nice thing is, at least even they can’t feel entitled to Berkeley - after all, Berkeley is a top public school, not just any. </p>
<p>You are right, I very much endorse transparency - it’s one of the key things I feel a public U owes students. Indeed, I am a huge supporter of transparency for all universities, unless there is an expressly good reason it is being obscured.</p>
<p>Wow ecullen 90% of Stanford transfers are from CC? Hmm maybe we should follow Stanford’s example, which admits “between 20 and 40 transfer student” and given that its total undergrad is ~6k and we have ~24k undergrads which means we should restrict transfers to Berkeley between 80 and 160 transfers as opposed to the over 3800 that are admitted. I wonder why many privates reserve VERY few seats to transfers…maybe they know a secret.</p>
<p>Perhaps 15 years ago, I might have sympathized with this argument. But not anymore. Not with the widespread proliferation of excellent educational tools available for free on the Internet such as wikipedia, MIT’s own course notes through OCW, and plenty of other pedagogical tools and free lecture notes. I am increasingly convinced that a properly dedicated student could receive an excellent education that plugs whatever remedial gaps he may have simply through just diligent study of wikipedia alone, without even using the numerous online college course notes that are readily available with a simple Google search. {For example, I would surmise that I now know more about how thermodynamics actually works by perusing wikipedia articles than I ever did as a student in the actual thermodynamics course, as, frankly, the wikipedia articles are far better organized than was the course.} </p>
<p>Keep in mind that we are not requiring that community college students find obscure online course materials on advanced topics. The Berkeley content exams in question would cover only introductory coursework, of which there are vast resources online. For example, the following single site alone contains numerous links to a vast trove of free organic chemistry course notes and tutorials. And that’s just one site. </p>
<p>Here’s the first of a set of free OChem video lectures that are, frankly, far more interesting and more informative than many OChem lectures taught by many Berkeley professors. </p>
<p>What I agree Berkeley could (and should) do to facilitate the process is place sample content exams - perhaps even old ones - online, along with passing scores, so that transfer community college candidates know the bar that they are expected to meet . Yet I don’t think it is entirely reasonable for cc students who take unrigorous coursework to supplement it with additional online preparatory materials. With the widespread availability of educational materials through the Internet, I have no sympathy for students to claim that they couldn’t prepare themselves properly.</p>
<p>^ Exactly. Materials for the motivated are so available for basic things, it’s hilarious. I can find quite a lot on obscure topics if I need to, which should tell one how easy it is to study some intro topics properly and show one can handle a proper level of rigor.</p>
<p>First, Stanford doesn’t reserve seats for transfers because they want students who can take advantage of staying an Stanford for 4 years. Whenever spaces open up, however, out of the thousands of qualified applications, community college students are always the select 15+/20 students admitted first.</p>
<p>Second, I attended a prestigious private high school for 1 year before transferring to a low-budget public high school in downtown LA. I can tell you, in contrast on the rigor and workload from my private school, the kids from my public school who got into Berkeley were a total joke. Community college was significantly more difficult than the public school (although no where close to my private school) and MOST of Cal’s freshman are from these crappy schools. </p>
<p>However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that it’s not the admissions process that matters, but what students do with their opportunity to attend Cal. Some of the freshman and transfers are doing pretty well, meaning the admissions officers saw potential. The others probably didn’t have the work ethic. Sure, both the public school and junior college kids got easy As to get into Berkeley, but who are you to say they don’t deserve to go there? Have you screened their applications? Your judgment is so biased and there’s no point in this thread because it’s not going to change anything. </p>
<p>I’m transferring into Cal with a FULL scholarship, yet I dropped out of high school, cleaned up my act, aced community college and I have the drive and work ethic to get a 4.0 at Cal. That’s all that matters. </p>
<p>*I’m not reading this thread anymore so don’t expect a reply. Bye.</p>
<p>LOL!! and for someone who can’t even pass a community college trigonometry class…you shouldn’t be preaching sh it. Even 15 year old high school kids can ace that.</p>
<p>^ why do you like stalking people to belittle them?</p>
<p>this thread needs to die…so i guess i’ll give 123456789bc a lil leeway for being “charming” because ecullen you should have just let this pathetic thread end.</p>
<p>jane…i like you (cuz of our common ground :D) but it’s not stalking because all the posts are public. View user profile –> view threads created by user =/= stalking.</p>
<p>meh…all I’m saying is that ecullen confirms and validates the whole point of this thread. </p>
<p>There **is **a double standard here where people like ecullen get a full ride in a major so soft and get D’s in extremely easy classes while actually intelligent people pay out of their asses to study something that requires skill and more than common sense. That’s not really fair.</p>
<p>what is not fair is your devaluation of intelligence based on majors and performance on math classes. </p>
<p>some of us are brilliant and genius with written words and others can excel in the language of numbers and codes. why should you base intelligence on two very different subjects?</p>
<p>ecullen is intelligent and worked his ass off to achieve a 4.0 in English. </p>
<p>English is not easy, creativity and talent does not come naturally to everyone. </p>
<p>math and hard sciences are essential for advancement as a modern technologically advanced culture… but where would we be with out the humanities and arts? our culture our language our unique ability to make poetry and interact with other humans… we need people who are good at these things too. other wise math and science would mean nothing. </p>
<p>Some people are better at other subjects than others. For example, I despite my English class right now, but I do fine in my other classes.</p>
<p>I, however, understand your point. Someone who cannot pass Trig (not judging) in the general sense would likely not score very high on the SATs and SAT2s, which are very important in Cal admissions. In this sense, someone with poor math skills may find it almost impossible to gain admittance as a freshman to a University as with such high standards.</p>
<p>I’ll admit it. I would not have been admitted as a freshman (didn’t apply, but never worked hard enough in school to attain the stats required for Berkeley). Hell, even if I did work my butt off for two years, I still would have likely been rejected. Transferring is totally the backdoor alternative (that’s what she said) to graduate with a Cal degree.</p>
<p>Nobody (as far as I can tell) is denigrating the value of English (or the humanities in general) for society. </p>
<p>The issue is that certain majors are, unfortunately, graded easier than others and demand less work. This is a problem even at Berkeley, to the great frustration of many an engineering or science student. Far more engineering students take ‘extra’ humanities or social science courses as cheesepuff GPA-boosters than humanities/soc-sci students who take ‘extra’ engineering courses to boost their GPA’s. {Heck, the number of students in the latter category is probably zero - nobody takes extra engineering courses in order to rack up a bunch of easy A’s}. </p>
<p>“The physical sciences and engineering had rigorous grading standards roughly in line with the recommendations from 1976,” stated Rine, "while the humanities and social sciences in many classes had all but given up on grades below a B, and in many courses below an A-</p>
<p>Heck, I remember one engineering student who, being in his last semester, took the only engineering course he needed to graduate, and supplemented it with 4 humanities/soc-sci courses. He worked harder in that one engineering course than in the other 4 courses combined…and nevertheless received the lowest grade in that course of all of his courses for that semester. Think about that for a moment. This was a course in which he was actually majoring, and hence he had obviously taken numerous other related courses previously. He had comparatively little training in humanities or social sciences, and indeed, he had never taken a single course in some of those majors. Nevertheless, he worked less and received consistently higher grades in those courses than he did in a course in his very own major.</p>
<p>To be fair, this is no a problem specific to Berkeley, but rather a nationwide phenomenon. </p>
<p>many students will leave the engineering school and transfer into arts and sciences after a year, typically majoring in the social sciences. When you ask students why they make this move, they often say it’s because of the workload and grading.
…
*I have heard a common story about seeing people in dorms partying away and wondering, “Why not me?”</p>
<p>That’s what I mean by unnecessary (and harmful) attrition.I don’t believe that the sciences and engineering should demand less of their students. Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to demand more.*</p>
<p>*science departments today grade on average 0.4 points lower than humanities departments, and 0.2 points lower than social science departments. Such harsher grading for the sciences appears to have existed for at least 40 years, and perhaps much longer.</p>
<p>Relatively lower grades in the sciences discourage American students from studying such disciplines, the authors argue.</p>
<p>“Partly because of our current ad hoc grading system, it is not surprising that
the U.S. has to rely heavily upon foreign-born graduate students for technical fields of research and upon foreign-born employees in its technology firms,” they write.*</p>
<p>A lot of people who are admitted as freshmen have community college credit, especially for math 1a, 1b, 53. They get out of taking those hard classes at Berkeley. But then again you wouldn’t want them taking these classes with you, would you, because they’d get the best grades in the class. Not to mention that it would be a waste of their time, even though these classes at Berkeley are much harder than at a community college. </p>
<p>It is ridiculous for anyone to comment about the preparedness of another student. Unless you’ve seen their application and their Berkeley transcript then there is no way for you to have a meaningful opinion about this. </p>
<p>Bottom line is that someone else’s education at Berkeley doesn’t impede yours. Quit being a jerk. If you are so much superior then the job market will surely compensate you as such. If you have some inferiority complex because you didn’t get into Stanford or Harvard when you were a high school senior, then I’d suggest you get over it real quick or apply for grad school there.</p>
<p>Generalizing is bad, sure. But it’s a stretch to say you can’t make meaningful observations
about someone’s preparation from seeing how they actually handle the school [that would be more relevant than their former transcripts]. Obviously you take into account bad days, medical conditions, special needs, etc.</p>
<p>It’s not that someone else’s education would impede mine - it’s that legitimately better prepared students get rejected in favor of more qualified ones because the criteria for admission don’t sufficiently take into account preparation or rigor of the former schools enough [for frosh and transfers alike]. I heard some sad accounts about better prepared transfers being denied, and I hate it. The real jerks are those who don’t acknowledge this problem is there, and don’t honor the work some people put in to prepare.</p>
<p>I just don’t understand the basis for those claims. What I am reading is not a generalization, it’s just a conjecture. A generalization would be extending something that is known to be true for a certain case to a less restrictive case. I don’t think you are really doing that because you don’t know it is true for any one. </p>
<p>You mention some anecdotal evidence but I don’t see how someone can evaluate how someone else is handling the school. If you are looking at their Berkeley transcripts then that would be one way. I don’t see how one student can gather that much information about another without access to what grades they are getting. </p>
<p>I don’t see how you can say whether the admissions process does or does not take into account rigor. If you are looking at someone’s application, then that would be one way. </p>
<p>I don’t see your conjecture carrying any weight. It is an empirical question and you don’t have the data to answer it.</p>
;)</p>