<p>I'd always thought grade deflation/inflation was a myth, but enough people believe in it that I'm curious if it actually happens. How bad is it, if it exist at Berkeley? Recently I also found out about how Princeton limits it's number of "A" grades to something around 30% or so. For those who go or went to Berkeley, or would otherwise be more knowledgable on this subject, how bad is the grade deflation?</p>
<p>science courses deflate. humanities inflate. general trend (but there are exceptions, of course).</p>
<p>I think it is totally fair for classes to not give out more than 20-30% A’s… that way people actually put in the effort to learn the material. Anyway, I wouldn’t say that Berkeley deflates, it is just that some other schools (Harvard, Brown, etc from what I hear) inflate.</p>
<p>Yeah not really deflation, just a *****. Most intro. science courses and some upper divs curve the average grade to a B-</p>
<p>You may want to read [url=<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com]National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities<a href=“with%20average%20GPA%20by%20school%20at%20the%20bottom”>/url</a>.</p>
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Pretty much this. Cal doesn’t really have grade deflation except for a few courses where the professor is unusually harsh. 20-30% A+/A/A- is what people usually compare grade inflation/deflation to. Many Cal classes give a lot more than that, like 50% is not uncommon.</p>
<p>Even 20-30% A’s is a little generous because this is in classes where the average is a solid B- but remember how everyone tells you that a C is average although it’s almost never true? There are also some statistical tricks to play, consider that a class with 40% A/A+ and 30% A- with the rest F’s would have a solid B- average.</p>
<p>Cal has grade inflation, more than some schools and less than others.</p>
<p>Yes, it does exist.</p>
<p>I’d say Cal has grade inflation. It’s average GPA has undoubtedly increased over the past 50 years or so, but it’s just not AS grade inflated many of the private Ivy Leagues. It also depends largely on department. For example, the EECS department has a policy to try to curb grade inflation by setting the average GPA of lower division courses anywhere between 2.5-2.9 and the average gpa of upper division courses anywhere between 2.7-3.1.</p>
<p>Cal has the highest average gpa of all the uc’s at about 3.3. UCLA is about 3.2 and the rest of the other UC’s tend to be closer to 3.0 (this information is all available on UC Statfinder). You could argue that Cal’s grades are the most inflated or alternatively say the school just has better students.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input! A lot of people interested in Cal seem to be worried about this…so thanks for your replies. My question is, if you are at a decent high school (maybe not top 100 High Schools as ranked by some of the news agencies), but still decent, and you managed good grades, would that be a reasonable indicator of grades at Cal? Could someone, taking at least a couple honors or AP classes a year in high school with a 4.0, suddenly drop to a 3.0 at Cal?</p>
<p>funnyman4, your study habits change in college (well it did for me). For example, in high school, I didn’t read anything I was assigned. I took the hardest courses available, but I would skim and wikipedia and BS my way through (it worked). In college, I actually read the majority of my assignments. I got A’s and some B’s in high school and I actually think I’m getting more A’s in Berkeley because I study more. My study habits have definitely been a year in the making though. Classes in Berkeley are definitely harder, but you manage it better.</p>
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<p>Sure - or even worse. I can think of a number of people with excellent high school records - including even some Regents/Chancellor Scholars - who actually flunked out of Berkeley. </p>
<p>To be fair, the bulk of them were engineering students. But that only highlights a crucial issue to which nobody has ever once proposed an adequate rationale. The salience of relative grade inflation is evidenced not so much between Berkeley vs. top private schools but rather between students at the same school but in different majors. Specifically, why - whether at Berkeley or any other school - does engineering have to be graded so much more harshly than are, say, the humanities? Is the implication that engineering students are simply dumber and lazier than are humanities students and therefore deserve far worse grades? </p>
<p>If engineering students should be graded harshly, then so should every other major. Otherwise, they should not be graded harshly. Why should they be singled out? I’ve never understood why inter-school grade deflation receives far more attention than does inter-major grade deflation which is surely far worse. A Berkeley ‘Studies’ major will almost certainly enjoy easier grading than will a private university engineering major.</p>
<p>I think you should evaluate your study habits rather than your actual GPA number. People can always coast by high school and classes by ********ting and getting an A. Not saying everyone does but it’s possible. But if you truly think you have good study habits then you should be fine at Berkeley.</p>
<p>@sakky–thanks for the answer. As for your comments about engineering–could it also be the fact that engineering is inherently harder than other majors? Or do they cap the number of As at a set number lower than other classes?</p>
<p>Also to anyone who knows, a question about prerequisites at Berkeley–do all undergrads, regardless of major, have to complete science, history, math, and english requirements like in high school? You could call that a “core” curriculum, I guess. So, if there are a lot (are there?) of core requirements, is there still enough room to complete prereqs specific to your major?</p>
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<p>I don’t believe that any intellectual topic is inherently easier than any other. Those currently easy majors could simply demand more work (that is, far more reading, more assignments, more quizzes/test, a higher quality of writing, more everything) and - crucially - assign failing grades to those students who can’t or won’t complete the additional work. Why not? That’s what the engineering departments do. </p>
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<p>They do, as evidenced by the discussion of EECS grade curve policies above, of which other engineering majors are similar. But that then simply raises the question: if that policy is appropriate for engineers, why not for other majors as well? Why are engineers singled out? </p>
<p>To be clear, none of this discussion has anything to do with me personally. I am long past the stage where grades will have any impact on my own career. But I do fret for those incoming engineering students - whether at Berkeley or elsewhere - who are about to have those academic records and their corresponding career futures despoiled, to the point of even a letter of expulsion for poor grades that will be stapled to their academic records for the rest of their lives. Such is particularly galling when those students could have graduated problem free if they had simply chosen an easier major. An EECS student with a 1.9 GPA surely worked harder and is more talented than is an ‘X Studies’ major with a 2.1, yet the former will be expelled whereas the latter will not.</p>
<p>@ Sakky: I think you should also bring up the example of midrange GPAs, not just the horror stories. I think its the midrange GPAs that are the worst because people in the 2.0 range are going to go into the workforce so grades aren’t as inherently important. </p>
<p>An engineer with a 3.0-3.5 GPA is just below medical/law school cutoffs, but in EECS/BioE/ME that’s not a bad GPA at all. These are students who get shafted the most because they are obviously talented and hardworking enough to get into top med/law schools, bright enough to get into Berkeley engineering as an undergrad, but no matter what their MCAT/LSAT score is, its unlikely they will get into even a mid-tier professional program. </p>
<p>And so, I know many engineers who have been forced to go to graduate school (where they account for GPA difficulty) and give up dreams of, say, a clinical career where an engineering mindset does come in very handy, much more so than your Art history major applying to medical school.</p>
<p>The professional degree admission system is already bad enough, where schools don’t consider rigor of coursework to be relevant, but Berkeley double dips this by taking the high quality students (by high school admissions) in time consuming majors, such as engineering, and assigning significantly harsher curves to them. If anything it should be the opposite.</p>
<p>Professional schools are all about your numbers, they don’t care how much you learned at Berkeley or even what you studied. When Berkeley realizes this, maybe they’ll get a donation from me.</p>
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<p>No. Undergraduates have breadth requirements that vary by college, but for each breadth requirement, the student has a choice of numerous courses to take. So there is no one course that every student must take.</p>
<p>For example, while every college at Berkeley requires a “first semester Reading and Composition course”, there is a large list of such courses available. Also, there are math and science courses for non-majors that are much less rigorous than those for students majoring in those subjects.</p>
<p>[College</a> of Letters and Science requirements](<a href=“http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/requirement/summary.html]College”>http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/requirement/summary.html)
[College</a> of Engineering humanities and social studies requirements](<a href=“http://coe.berkeley.edu/hssreq]College”>Humanities and Social Sciences - Berkeley Engineering)</p>
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<p>The result is a grade inflation race that will eventually lead to people asking here “will a 3.95 get me into medical/law school?”</p>
<p>If they really cared about the quality of students, they would make adjustment factors based on how well the students at a given undergraduate school did in their medical/law school. I.e. if 3.9 students from school A did as well as 3.6 students from school B, then a -0.3 adjustment factor would be applied when comparing applicants from school A versus school B.</p>
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<p>Sure, eventually that might happen, but that’s irrelevant to those current students who won’t be admitted to the professional school they want (or perhaps not any professional school at all) because they suffered from grade deflation. Current students have to deal with the system as it exists right now, not how it might become in the far future. </p>
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<p>You just highlighted the core of the problem. I agree that if professional schools cared about the quality of students, then they would adjust GPA’s for grade deflation, whether it stems from a particular school or, more saliently, from a particular major such as engineering.</p>
<p>But professional schools clearly don’t care. And it doesn’t seem as if they will start caring anytime soon. Hence, if Berkeley cared about how well its own undergraduates, then Berkeley would and should revise its grading policies upwards accordingly - the Berkeley engineering majors drastically so. But they don’t. In other words, the professional schools don’t care, and Berkeley doesn’t really care either. Nobody cares. </p>
<p>Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the uncaring-ness is that Berkeley won’t even provide for a GPA correction for its own undergraduates to be admitted to its own professional program. For example, Berkeley undergrads who were admitted to Berkeley’s own law school over the past 6 years have had an average GPA/LSAT of a whopping ~3.85/168-169. You would think that if any law school in the world would understand the grade deflation within the Berkeley undergraduate program, it would be Berkeley’s own law school. However, they clearly either don’t understand it, or don’t care. </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Law/LawStats.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Law/LawStats.stm</a></p>
<p>sakky, I think you tend to underestimate the grade inflation (or lack of grade deflation) at Cal. A 3.85 GPA is about the top 8% of the class, and since this is an average it means there are students below that bracket who receive admission as well. Boalt should accept the best students it can, and taking the top 10% or more of the undergraduate class is fair for a law school of that caliber.</p>
<p>Someone posted earlier in this thread that the average GPA campus-wide is a 3.3. The hypothetical students you quote with 2.1 GPAs are outliers, just not in a good way. This does not significantly differ across colleges either, despite myths about engineering. Perhaps I should rephrase that as myths about L&S – percentile-wise, it is harder to get an A in lower-division math and physics classes than it is to get an A in the lower-division EECS ones. It is just that a lot of humanities majors do inflate grades, giving engineering the appearance that it is unusually harsh. (I would love to see official stats on whether technical majors get most of the top grades in their breadth classes though.)</p>
<p>I feel that when you tell the story of a 2.1 student, you should also keep in mind that a 3.8 student is equally (un)common. For most people here painting the picture of the average 3.3 student is more relevant than the one of a student from the bottom of the class.</p>