<p>You’d have to convince the California state government of that, not me.</p>
<p>But you’d want to make a proposal that is self-adjusting over the medium or long term, since what is “useful” (from the state point of view of generating increased economic activity and tax revenue) can change over time (and majors added or deleted).</p>
<p>If you want a simple way of making self-adjusting incentive for students to go into fields which help the state economy and state government, then just charge higher tuition, but offer tuition rebates (or student loan forgiveness) after graduation based on the amount of California state income tax paid over the first several years after graduation.</p>
<p>I would imagine that since Cal has a reputation for having lower GPAs in EECS that those at grad schools would be aware of that and be more lenient in that category? Surely a 3.0 at EECS would mean a lot more than a 4.0 at a much easier, almost unknown school. But what seems slightly problematic still is that a lot of Cal students’ competition is going to come from top Ivies and other schools of the like, which often inflate GPAs. Is that enough reason to not want to go to Cal, despite its quality undergrad experience? </p>
<p>There’s been a lot of discussion about going to med school after Cal–how tough would it be to get into a business or law school after Cal–what sorts of GPA ranges would you need for the top schools in those categories?</p>
<p>Also, someone said that Cal isn’t as hard as people make it out to be GPA-wise–is that really true or is that just coming from a smart EECS student?</p>
<p>That would still penalize students in majors which attract better students. You could adjust it be implementing the above for lower division courses campuswide (though there could still be issues if different colleges or majors had different admissions thresholds), but have upper division courses in each major scaled to have an average GPA based on the lower division GPA of students in or declaring that major. That way, a supposedly “easy” major that attracted less capable students would have a lower average GPA than a major that attracted more capable students (of course, if the number of transfer students is large, that could gum up the calculation due to differences in grade inflation/deflation and student competitiveness at their source schools).</p>
<p>No a 3.0 in EECS at Berkeley would not mean more as a 4.0 (in electrical engineering) at a lesser known school. Berkeley does have grade deflation in engineering (I’d say -0.5, I’ll explain where I got this number from), but the problem is more that different majors have widely varying GPA standards and not just at Berkeley. EECS will be tough almost anywhere, but Women’s studies less so.</p>
<p>Now with regards to a top graduate school. I got offers from decent graduate programs in BME (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton) and only got rejected from Yale and MIT. My GPA? A 3.47, with good GRE scores and excellent research of course.</p>
<p>@latecoder Congratulations! I don’t mean to pry or anything, but is 3.47 considered on the high end for GPAs? I’m just coming out of high school, so I’m not too sure what is considered “good,” “bad,” or “just okay.” I’d think that 3.47, especially at Berkeley is very impressive, but I could be wrong, since I’m used to thinking of GPA in high school terms (where someone with a 4.0 is not uncommon, whereas in college it would be much rarer). </p>
<p>The average high school GPA of Berkeley freshmen was 3.8, with 94% 3.75 or higher.</p>
<p>So if you take, for example, all of the high school students with GPAs of 3.7 to 4.0 and then spread them out between 2.0 and 4.0 (although somewhat denser on the higher end, since the average GPA was 3.27 in 2005), you can get an idea of how high school GPAs map to Berkeley GPAs.</p>
<p>a) Graduate programs are relatively easy to get into from Berkeley since the research is so strong here, and the GPA is well respected from graduate schools. </p>
<p>b) I dont want to do the graduate school dance! I want to go to medical school, and have an MCAT higher than the average of every medical school than one (WashU), and yet I didn’t even apply because I didnt have the clinical experience in addition to the low GPA, since I was too busy doing research and keeping my GPA up. </p>
<p>Had I majored in something easy at some other school, I would have probably gotten an even higher MCAT (less pressure from classes), a higher GPA, and more volunteer hours. What I would find most saddening is that the BME classes at Cal were really heavy on improving clinical medicine through technology. Every BME class you take at Cal constantly ties in with what you see in the clinic. In fact its really engineers/scientists, and doctors with an engineering mindset, that are driving medicine forward. Why wouldn’t medical schools want someone who took BME for 4 years of their life over someone who took, say, Zoology, Plant Bio, or <insert easy=“” premed=“” major=“”>. </insert></p>
<p>To answer your question. A 3.47 is an above average GPA for Cal Engineering, but nothing special for top graduate programs. I got in solely because of my research and reference letters, and because I did heavy EECS coursework to be a multidimensional applicant, hence my username.</p>
<p>I see. Well, nevertheless, what you did at Berkeley is impressive. </p>
<p>Do you happen to know what the situation is like for business or law? For law you generally would want some sort of a humanity (which people seem to agree are easier at Berkeley), so is there a higher GPA expectation? Also for business grad school, if you were to take econ or get into the Haas undergrad program, what GPA would they be looking for then? Are econ and Haas also easier (less deflated, or even not really deflated at all?). </p>
<p>Basically, it seems that they recognize that EECS heavliy deflates. Does that make non-EECS students less able to get into a top grad school? Or is it not much different?</p>
<p>Did some reading and found out that some complaints were even from non-EECS majors. Apparently some say there is a “Haas curve” where only 5% of students achieve A grades. If that is true, isn’t that worse than EECS?</p>
<p>But then there are people who say that “it is easy once you are in.” Does anyone know how it actually is?</p>
<p>Yeah, but that happens now. Right now, I think there is little dispute that the majors with the harshest grade curves such as engineering or natural sciences also tend to have the most talented and hardest working students, on average. {For those humanities and soc. science students who might be offended, come on, honestly, you have to admit that there are a disproportionate fraction of untalented and lazy students in your majors.} A ‘grade bank’ would go a long way towards fixing the problem. Would it completely solve it? No, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. </p>
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<p>This is an idea that I have proposed myself numerous times. The practical problems with it are political in nature. Any move to raise admissions standards by decreasing the admissions pool would be viewed as ‘reducing opportunity’ (a myopic objection at best because what opportunities are you truly reducing? The opportunity to flunk out and permanently ruin your academic record? Those students at the depths of the grading curve would surely have been better off at an easier school that is more suited for their talents.) </p>
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<p>One would imagine that, but, sadly, it largely doesn’t happen, particularly when it comes to the professional school admissions that are so desired by many students at Berkeley. Yale Law, and Harvard Medical School would far prefer a ‘Leisure Studies’ major from a no-name creampuff 4th tier school with a 4.0 GPA than a Berkeley EECS major with a 3.0. Sadly, you are better off not even taking a difficult course at all than taking it and receiving a poor grade. </p>
<p>Elite scholarship competitions are also heavily GPA-dependent. The Marshall Scholarship specifically states that you must have a minimum 3.7 GPA to even apply. If you’re an engineer with a 3.6 - which is an astoudingly strong GPA for an engineer - the Marshall Scholarship committee doesn’t care. All they’ll see is that you didn’t meet the minimum requirements. The Rhodes Scholarship, while not having a formal GPA minimum, is also heavily GPA-dependent. That is surely a crucial reason why relatively few engineering students ever win the Rhodes or Marshall. </p>
<p>…applicants must have a GPA of 3.7 or higher to be eligible</p>
<p>That is why premeds may be well advised to take their premed requirements at an easy community college rather than at their own university to avoid the strenuous and high-risk grade curve. Prelaws are similarly advised to avoid difficult coursework that could damage their GPA. Another strategy would be to reserve as much of your difficult coursework for the last semester of your senior year during which time the professional school adcoms will have already made their admissions decisions and therefore will not be able to view the corresponding grades. Elite scholarship competitors are similarly well advised to avoid difficult coursework entirely. </p>
<p>But that’s not the way that it should be. Such wide disparities in grading - where certain courses and certain entire majors are far more difficult than others - should not exist. That not only incites cynicism, but even worse, encourages the gaming of the system, where students choose coursework and sometimes even entire majors not for intellectual interest but simply to avoid difficult grading. For example, I can think of a number of people who have outright told me that they deliberately avoided technical courses because they wanted to protect their GPA. </p>
<p>The one major exception with which I agree with latecoder is that engineering graduate programs do seem to compensate for difficult grading, perhaps because their admissions are not highly grade-oriented anyway. Strong research and faculty recommendations will usually overcome any GPA deficiencies you may have.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t want the upper division “grade bank” adjusted for the lower division grades of students in each major?</p>
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<p>In the pre-med forums, it is commonly said that medical schools do not like to see pre-med requirement courses taken at community colleges (at least for those who entered a four year university as freshmen). Also, while community colleges tend to have less competitive students, they also are not joining the [grade</a> inflation](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/Californiacc.html]grade”>California Community Colleges) race (indeed, they are actually deflating, as opposed to “not inflating as much” as Berkeley is compared to some other schools).</p>
<p>Of course, in the absence of any course requirements for law school, it should not be surprising that GPA gamesmanship in course selection is common among pre-law students.</p>
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<p>Smaller application and enrollment volume also means greater familiarity with students from each undergraduate school in the subject. There is also much more incentive for faculty to select the optimal graduate students when it comes to research, as opposed to medical and law schools that just need to select “good enough” students who can handle the course work.</p>
<p>I want lots of things. Heck, ideally, I’d like to be a billionaire, look like Brad Pitt, and be dating Megan Fox. </p>
<p>But, as I’ve learned through painful experience, the more extravagant the request, the more likely that you will get nothing at all. </p>
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<p>The premed forums would also emphatically agree that what med-school adcoms really don’t like to see are poor grades. It is far better to get A’s in premed coursework at a community college than to get C’s’ (or worse) at your regular school.</p>
<p>To be clear, if you can get A’s in the Berkeley premed coursework, then you should obviously do that. But, clearly only a small minority can do that - indeed, the grade curve allows for only a small minority to do so. I think there is little dispute that all of the (former) Berkeley premeds who got stuck with terrible grades wishes that they had completed their coursework at a community college instead.</p>
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<p>The former almost certainly vastly outweighs the latter. Let’s face it - it’s not that hard for a Berkeley student to be amongst the very best students at a community college. </p>
<p>Furthermore, not only do community colleges offer open admissions, but there exists a plethora of community colleges. What that means is that you can (and should) engage in ‘grade shopping’: some community college premed instructors will grade easier than others, so shop around for the easiest ones. That will obviously require some legwork, but you can ask around or investigate other websites that offer grading and instructor evaluations for various schools. But your freedom to ‘shop’ at Berkeley is far more constrained, as there are only a limited number of premed coursework professors and they all tend to use the same grade curve. </p>
<p>But ultimately, ‘grade shopping’ is simply a sad testament to the inequities of the system. It’s simply a form of gaming the system, which shouldn’t be necessary, but sadly is.</p>
<p>Actually, even that doesn’t fully capture the whole picture, for 2.0 is not the proper lower cutoff. You need a 2.0 just to remain in good academic standing, but as I’ve been saying throughout the thread, not everybody remains in good standing. Not everybody makes it to graduation. Some students will flunk out.</p>
<p>@sakky–do you know anything about what the curve is like in other majors? Most people on this thread seem to say that the humanities are easier, though I’ve heard of something called the “Haas curve” that they supposedly put in place for Haas students, where only 5% of grades are As. Do the professors follow that?</p>
<p>I’m not sure whether you meant to lump Haas with the humanities, but if so, I should state upfront - business administration is not (or least, is not supposed to be) a humanity. {Now, to be fair, some have argued that the academic study of management is akin to philosophy or even literary analysis what with the incessant citing of dead Continental philosophers and an emphasis on argumentation and verbal dexterity to conceal the paucity of empirical evidence, or heck, often times even in the face of countervailing empirical evidence. But I think that’s a subtopic others on this thread would find uninteresting and abstruse.} </p>
<p>To your question, there is indeed such a concept as the Haas Curve, although how closely most professors adhere to it is debatable. But while the Haas Curve does gravely restrict your opportunities earning A’s, more importantly, it also sharply circumscribes the chances of actually failing, and it is precisely that lower end of the grading spectrum that has always concerned me the most. Contrast that with the engineering majors, particularly within the weeder sequences, where failing is a perennial danger and students will literally flunk out, not just out of the major, but out of the entire university. Those engineers would gladly implement the Haas Curve if they could.</p>
<p>So you would say in general, any major that is not a “fluffy” one would end up sharply curbing someone’s chances at a grad school?</p>
<p>Say if I wanted to attend grad business school later on. Would I be better off at a different school or pursuing a different major other than the one Haas offers? To me, it seems like Haas is already extremely hard to get into already, AND given the harsher curve, there is going to be a very, very slim chance that someone would leave with good grad school prospects.</p>
<p>Disagree. I know many many friends from schools like MIT who get into the top graduate programs in engineering because the GPA and research quality of students at MIT is so high. Same at Berkeley. To put it simply, engineering professors at Berkeley are the cream of faculty, and doing research and getting a letter from them is very significant. </p>
<p>That’s not to say you can’t go to a lesser known school, which happens quite often. But looking at the graduate students at EECS in my lab they are generally from</p>
<p>So its not “brand name”, like an ivy league stamp, but more so of engineering reputation. IF you want to go to graduate school in engineering, I dont know of many better schools than Berkeley.</p>
<p>@ funnyman: All engineering majors are deflated since they share common weeder classes. I would say Bioengineering is actually the worst for most students since they have to take the engineering weeders, Organic, some EE classes, and some memorization heavy biology classes usually with a bunch of premeds. And sadly, its getting worse every year, as the department of BioE becomes more established at other schools.</p>
<p>Depends on what you mean by ‘graduate school’. As latecoder has been explaining (and to which I have agreed), Berkeley engineering grade deflation does not seem to notably affect one’s ability to win admission to engineering graduate school, and indeed may actually enhance it. Similarly, the graduate program that most Haas undergrads would seemingly enter would be business graduate programs, either MBA or PhD. I suspect that admission to the former would not be heavily affected by the Haas Curve as MBA admissions are not heavily GPA-dependent anyway, being far more reliant on work experience and interviews, nor would the latter as PhD admissions are influenced largely by research and faculty rec’s. </p>
<p>The issue seems to be concentrated within law and medical schools. Unfortunately, these are precisely the type of graduate schools that tend to draw the most interest amongst undergrads, whether at Berkeley or elsewhere; surely more Berkeley students apply to med school every year than to any other graduate program. Med and law school adcoms are infamous for, firstly, caring deeply about GPA, and secondly, providing little grade compensation for difficult coursework. The upshot is that if you want to be admitted to those programs, you are better off not even taking difficult coursework at all than in taking it and earning poor grades.</p>