<p>@BSD-In an earlier thread, someone posted data that indicated transfer students have higher GPAs at graduation than regular students. Of course, this caused people to whine about how unfair it is that transfer students get to bypass lower division weeders.</p>
<p>Here is a good web comic which summarizes people’s view of transfer students and its justifications. [xkcd:</a> How it Works](<a href=“http://xkcd.com/385/]xkcd:”>xkcd: How it Works)</p>
<p>Replace “girl” with “transfer student”. A dumb student is, after all, only a dumb student–unless he is also a transfer student. Then he is dumb because he is a transfer student.</p>
<p>I am sick of talk about prestige. Is there any other university on CC that is as obsessed with prestige as Berkeley, where students constantly bemoan the erosion of their prestige? What is prestige anyway? Prestige is good marketing. Prestige is a slick sales pitch. Prestige is what happens when consumerism gets a hold of universities–higher education reduced to a question of what looks good. </p>
<p>If there has been any decline in the quality of education at Berkeley it is because of the increasing number of students who value appearance over substance.</p>
I am an EECS transfer and I can definitely say that I am sub-par compared to freshman admits. Actually, I am going to enjoy bragging to all the freshmen admits on how easy I had it at CC and how dumb they were to work so hard in HS and waste $40,000 for fresh-soph years.</p>
<p>I feel a bit sorry for transfers because from what I have gathered in terms of talking with friends and overhearing conversations a lot of people when they find out people are transfers they lose credibility and often have to work to build up their trust. I don’t care what anybody says if the first thing somebody says is “I’m a transfer” you will usually lose some respect with freshman admits. It’s a combination of bitterness and truth. Stereotypes don’t just come out of nowhere. If transfers had a >80% matriculation rate into med and law school than obviously this stigma would change, but clearly this doesn’t happen. Also I think transfers are often looked down upon is because they tend to have pretty different goals that freshman admits. Transfers rarely go into engineering and science and most often filter into the social sciences. Many tend to be very humanitarian and very community oriented opting more into peace corps, helping back the community in simple realistic ways and not being much of prestige hogs and usually freshman look at this as “***.” I think transfers add a lot to a campus…but we seriously need to keep our standards higher than just picking up any decent CC kid because we have to. There is a reason why ivy leagues and stanford accept VERY few CC transfers.</p>
<p>Uhh having talked to a lot of transfers it seems that money is usually not the reason. I say a good 80% of transfers were just not ready to start a 4-year right out of HS.</p>
<p>We all know most transfer kids here don’t deserve to be here. If they compete with freshman applicants, i wonder how many would actually get in(lol…)
But what can we do? Just let them go, and let them get their degrees. They should be getting like half the diploma, but who cares…? it’s just transfers.
Just ignore them…</p>
<p>One of my high school friends actually turned down Berkeley’s acceptance in high school and went to San Jose State instead because of a free ride scholarship and less cut-throat pre-med classes. She ended up graduating with a 3.9 GPA, no undergraduate debt, and is now finishing her first year at UCLA medical school.</p>
<p>I know this doesn’t relate to transfer students, but it does relate to how most college students don’t think long term (both academically, career, and finance-wise). Transfer students aren’t burdened with fresh/soph year debt and most transfer in with grants/scholarships to fully cover their junior/senior years. In the end, whether you’re a transfer or freshman admit, it’s all about what you do after college and later on in life.</p>
<p>fun fact: Not **every **transfer student went to community college because they were poor. Some just weren’t capable of getting the grades to get into a university.</p>
<p>And yes, prestige is about marketing. That’s why I’m here, to market myself better so that I’ll have a better chance of getting into a competitive professional school. because of the good marketing of my school (in combination with good grades and test scores), the programs that I apply to will be further assured that I have the mental acuity to withstand and excel with them. With a CSU Monterey Bay product or some tier III school…they don’t have that same assurance.</p>
<p>There are a lot of stupid people, many of them are 4-year grads, many are transfers …because admissions for transfers isn’t very selective, you’ll see more transfers. And like someone said before, you don’t see uber competitive schools like Stanford or ivy’s just giving out admissions like at Cal. (and it’s really not about the $…that’s childish).</p>
<p>Throughout this thread, i see transfer kids trying to prove they are sub par with freshman applicants. lol, that makes me laugh…if they were compared with freshman applicants who were rejected to berkeley, i am sure most if not all transfer kids wouldn’t be getting in. But then again, who actually gives a S*** about transfer kids to cal?</p>
This is probably true in general. One curious trend in the link I showed is that while freshman admits consistently perform better than transfer students within a major, CS transfers do better than EECS freshman admits.</p>
<p>In terms of curriculum, EECS students do have to take the Physics 7 series as well as EE20 and Math53 but none of those strike me as dastardly hard classes (compared to H7 series), but it certainly could be that the breadth classes that L&S students take have gentler curves than the science/math courses that engineers have to do. There’s also a considerable population of hardcore EE people who struggle in the CS61 series but they need to get it over with even if they do something completely unrelated to CS (and more CS-aligned EECS students have both EE40 and 20 to deal with), while CS students only have one EE course to take. Statistics is a hairy subject vulnerable to manipulation so I’m not going to make any deep claims but the message I’m getting is that on average (an important point to keep in mind, these are just aggregate numbers), four-year students do better despite lower-divs often having tougher curves. We can also see great variance between students of different - yet very similar - majors, and I can only guess at why that is.</p>
<p>
That has been my general experience though I think it’s a little strong to say that most transfers have over a 3.8 (that’s the top ~10% of the class). Instead I think you’re finding that you associate with people who do generally well, plus people who have lower GPAs probably aren’t going to talk about them as much. I personally can’t name anyone with a sub-avg GPA but obviously someone has to be below the mean…</p>
<p>Try and use some new material next time, idiot. Not all transfers don’t deserve to be here, a lot of them don’t…but generalizing like that makes you just look insecure.</p>
<p>^All of you freshman are hating on the transfers because they are allowed do bypass all of the weeder coursed that made your GPA suffer fresh-soph years. Don’t be jealous. You have only yourself to blame for not being as smart and not doing your research before making your decision.</p>
<p>Dude if money is a big issue than your poor. If your poor than you get scholarships to pay for school EVEN from Berkeley. I’m finishing up my second year with little debt. My debt might be a bit A LITTLE less had I gone to a CC, but all the skills and experiences that Berkeley gave me in my first 2 years outweighed anything I could have done at a CC.</p>
<p>sense of inferiority much? kid, all the people really dont care about transfers…you can just get your degree and get out. simple as that. go out to real world and try to get a job with cc marked in your transcript. Why would i be jealous? you will be looked down upon for the last 2 years of college when you say “transfer”. Relax…you are just feeling inferior because you are transfer. You will get over that pretty soon… lol</p>
<p>HAHA I love how transfers say that they are smart for bypassing weeders. IMO if you rant about how your smart for going to CC to avoid weeders than you are saying the classes there are easy making you less prepared and thus less deserving to be at Cal.</p>
<p>Lol are you guys really serious. Why are you worried. You get your grades, we’ll get ours and the cream will rise to the top. You’re JUST Berkeley (21 rank meh) after all. LMAO See you in the fall!</p>
<p>3.0 HS gpa got you into berkeley? wow you must be one ********* to get in with that gpa. Good luck being a transfer at berkeley. Ha, not that anyone gives a **** about you guys :)</p>