<p>@ 33hours</p>
<p>Good to see that the spirit of tolerance is still alive at Cal.</p>
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It’s shameful.</p>
<p>The general assertion that transfer students are on average weaker is quite laughable. In fact, transfers graduate with roughly the same GPA as frosh admits. All the data shows that there is no statistically significant achievement gap between transfers and freshmen admits. </p>
<p>Additionally, observationally speaking, at UCLA, it seems like all the incompetent *<strong><em>s are the freshman admits. Having spent some time on the matter, i realize that it mostly comes down to entitlement. Freshman admits generally think they are the hottest *</em></strong> in town, and they just don’t work. Most 4 years i know have ridiculously laughable GPA’s with bleak features ahead. Moreover, given that it takes so much effort to get to a school like UCLA, many kids think they have reached the pinnacle of success and start partying and living the life they didn’t in high school. While, this too is a generalization, it has been observationally true. </p>
<p>Most transfers come in to their new school with a chip on their shoulder. They know people look down on them because most transfers have lived in the real world, and they know stupid people ***** about stupid ****. So what happens most often, is that they grind, and they out work most the freshman admits, simply because they want it more and they realize how high the stakes are. </p>
<p>I myself am a high school drop out. Dropped out to help the family. I went to CC and transferred to UCLA on a Regents Scholarship. I’m graduating Summa Cum Laude Honors this spring. Most the transfers i know are academic bad asses, generally always at the top of the class. However, i admit that this is likely a function of X students hanging out with X students. </p>
<p>As i admitted previously though, i am generalizing. I believe if one were to look at the numbers, it would be clear that there are just as many duds in the freshman admit pool, as there are in the transfer, if not more, given the argument i made about frosh admits thinking that their **** don’t stink.</p>
<p>As a Fall 2010 transfer, I am grossly subpar. This is evidenced by the fact that I was accepted to – and attended – Georgetown before being forced to return home due to the down economy. Yes, as a transfer student it will become my sole mission to wreak havoc upon Cal’s reputation.</p>
<p>Or, I might just do my work, get my units, and graduate. But that seems so BORING. Wake up to the real world: stop *****ing about who is better and realize that life on this planet is far too short and insignificant to be wasted arguing this point. </p>
<p>Adios.</p>
<p>lerock123</p>
<p>What exactly is it about the majority of transfer students that you’ve come across that makes them seem sub-par to you?</p>
<p>the freshman admits that survive the weed-outs are likely going to be more prepared than transfers, so we transfers are just going to have to suck it up and work harder i suppose</p>
<p>I’m not a CC transfer, but I have to defend them for a second. If transfers are truly undeserving to be at Cal, then their grades will reflect that and they won’t graduate. I can’t honestly say that for the sole reason they are a transfer and that they had to spend less money/work less (maybe) at undergrad by being at CC and avoiding weeders, should we hold a grudge against them. If they really aren’t the kind of students that should get into Cal, then the system will reflect that.</p>
<p>Yeah, it’s just like how gay marriage ruins the prestige of real, traditional marriages. Right Berkeley?!?!</p>
<p>By far, the dumbest thread I’ve ever seen on any message board.</p>
<p>It is true that transfers are less prepared, but that is something that they will just have to overcome. They will get their grades and we will get ours. It’s not like transfer students can’t succeed, some will and some won’t, just like incoming frosh. However comparing GPA at graduation is ambiguous and can be used to back-up either side of the argument, so GPA citations becomes irrelevant.</p>
<p>The most ridiculous part of this thread is how delusional the OP’s take on the world is. People are all there for the same reason: to get an education. Now, the fact that the OP wishes to spend his time comparing himself to others and judging others is his choice; I only have a problem with it when his thoughts make it to the outside world. Keep it in your head. It really shows his immaturity. This world needs people to come together and work together. It needs less of what the OP is iconic of.</p>
<p>You’re dismissing him too quickly. Yes, everyone’s there to get an education, and it doesn’t really affect HIS experience if other people do badly (if anything, it increases his GPA). But if it’s really true that the students who come in through the transfer process are on average significantly inferior, that’s a problem. Because it means that students who would do well at Berkeley aren’t getting the chance.</p>
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<p>Sure, because they’re allowed to skip over many of the Berkeley weeders. The freshman-admits would have had higher GPA’s if they didn’t count their weeder grades. </p>
<p>That speaks to the most vexing problem of the transfer process. If transfer students are allowed to bypass the weeders by taking corresponding courses at a community college, then freshman-admits should also be allowed to do the same. What’s fair is fair. Berkeley should not apply different sets of rules to different students.</p>
<p>I think if anyone is trying to say that transfer students are less intelligent, they are probably mistaken. However, I will agree they are likely less prepared academically – simply by virtue of the fact that they went to CC. While CC is not easier than high school (I can only speak to math/science courses), it is not a UC-level of rigor. </p>
<p>Based on my interactions with the kinds of people attending top tier schools and those not, the primary differentiator is their parents/backgrounds and not the people themselves. Most transfers have similar backgrounds to me; drug addicted mother, alcoholic/workaholic abandoning father, self-raised, growing up in a poor area with the correlated poor mentors and terrible public school teachers. If you think you are at Cal and others are not because you are amazing absent of luck, you are too deep in the elitist bubble. You have no idea what it feels like to achieve a 4.0 in high school and have no one congratulate you, to receive more attention when failing than succeeding.</p>
<p>Yes, you Cal students have worked hard. Yes, you would have achieved a similar level of success regardless of luck (because you are smart). But I doubt you’d be on the traditional path were it not for your traditional – and often exceptionally nurtured – upbringing. (I know, there are casualties to my generalizations.)</p>
<p>You are criticizing the mechanism by which the nontraditional achieve and you are doing it from your traditional context. I don’t think anyone in this thread has explicitly stated that transfers are dumb, but it feels strongly implied given the absence of proposed alternatives for nontraditional students should they be only academically inferior. Surely, if your standard for admittance to Cal is that students must be as intelligent as you, there isn’t a single mechanism by which to get there.</p>
<p>We should improve the admissions procedure, sure. We should improve CC education and the poor high school education feeding the CC’s, sure. But no, we should not be bullying transfers for following the only dimly lit light leading them out of their rectum of a life. *******s.</p>
<p>(Full disclosure: I was rejected from Cal EECS as a CC transfer for Fall 2010. My stats are in my history somewhere if you want to see how subpar I am… I would have got in were it not for an articulation mistake.)</p>
<p>This thread is hilarious. Why complain about transfers when Cal’s admissions process for students in general is at fault. Really, one should tell the whole story.</p>
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<p>This is the key point. Berkeley’s admissions may not sufficiently distinguish among differences in what the GPAs and all mean. Many freshmen admits are vastly subpar too. If transfers have an easier time getting 4.0s and then applying to Cal, so do students from easier high schools. </p>
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<p>Other key line.</p>
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<p>It is process to transfer credits in certain circumstances for freshman admits. I know because I did it! </p>
<p>However, I do find it vexing that they can transfer credits for breadth classes, like humanities, which I have to take despite having had billions of AP credits. My AP humanities classes end up being harder than the ones I take at Cal anyway.</p>
<p>“That speaks to the most vexing problem of the transfer process. If transfer students are allowed to bypass the weeders by taking corresponding courses at a community college, then freshman-admits should also be allowed to do the same. What’s fair is fair. Berkeley should not apply different sets of rules to different students.”</p>
<p>I don’t see what is vexing or unfair about this at all. Nothing is stopping any freshman admit from attending community college anyway and then transferring to Berkeley in two years. I’m sure that if someone was admitted to Berkeley as a frosh admit, they’d still be admitted two years later. Then they would be able to bypass these “weeders” everyone seems to have have a beef with and breeze through their upper divisions. The freshman admits who are academically up to the challenge can enroll at Berkeley and challenge themselves in their first few years.</p>
<p>But that’s just not the way it works. I haven’t personally noticed that it’s significantly easier to get an A in an upper-division versus a lower-division major class. For many classes in many majors, easier grading is a myth. The people who have been “weeded out” have dropped out because they were academically unprepared for any classes in that major, whether they were upper- or lower-division. In any case, the lower-division classes definitely teach conceptually simpler material.</p>
<p>Also, of all the transfer-haters in this thread, I have to wonder how many even know more than a few transfers. Before coming to Berkeley as a freshman, I had somehow picked up this same skewed notion that transfer students were somehow dumber and therefore less deserving to come. Since then, I have met many transfers in the dorms and classes, and from my experience, they work harder than almost any freshman admit I know, and often also set the curves on tests. Moreover, transfers are more mature, are more likely to come in with the mindset of working hard, are more likely to help their fellow classmates, and less likely to be competitive grade-whores. </p>
<p>Some transfers I know were bright students in high school who had large families and whose parents didn’t let them attend four-years right away. Some were bright students who didn’t know what they wanted to do in college or get out of college, and didn’t want to “waste tuition” the first few years while still deciding. Some were nontraditional students who had other priorities before attending college, such as starting a family. Some didn’t care much about school during high school, didn’t get into great colleges, and were then spurred to get their **** together and work like no other to get into Berkeley and excel here. Whatever the case, there are many factors actually placing them at an advantage over freshman admits, not least of which are smaller egos and better work ethic.</p>
<p>To those admitted to Berkeley but not yet attending, whether you are a frosh or transfer admit, wait a semester before commenting on what you think of each other.</p>
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<p>How ridiculous. Admissions <em>does</em> judge people’s qualifications, that’s the point. We the students and others interested in Cal probably should be thinking about what they’re doing right and wrong. If not in relation to Cal itself, just in relation to educational philosophy. Some of us may end up admissions officers somewhere; that’s right, once, the admissions officers you see making decisions probably were students (I hope to heavens they were at least).</p>
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<p>This I agree with too. It definitely can be astronomically harder to do well in the upper division. Grade distributions cannot fool one. When you get really specialized, it gets to the point where the students there should be significantly more talented at that specific stuff.</p>
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<p>Sorry, transfers aren’t always great. I am good friends with transfers who could academically incinerate a sweeping majority of freshman admits, so I know what they’re capable of. There is a legitimate complaint. It doesn’t mean all transfers are bad, of course, but there <em>are</em> different standards, and it makes some sense to think about why.</p>