<p>@sakky–ok, I will have to give some careful consideration into what sort of grad program I would want to pursue. I do have a question about when you said that the “upshot” was that, since GPA is heavily weighted in med and law schools, that one could go take not-so-difficult coursework to inflate the GPA a little. For grad schools that are not as GPA intensive, such as business school or a PhD school, do they take into account course difficulty? I’d like to take challenging classes, but if it does not help at all, would it be worth the risk of taking a hit to my GPA?</p>
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<p>While GPA gamesmanship and choosing “fluffy” “easy A” courses may maximize the chance of medical or law school admission, it also means betting one’s entire undergraduate study on medical or law school admission – if that does not happen, one is more likely to graduate with an “empty” bachelor’s degree with poor job and career prospects.</p>
<p>Of course, a lot of pre-meds (not just at Berkeley) major in biology, which has poor job and career prospects but probably does not grade inflate as much as humanities (sciences are generally the least grade inflated, while humanities are the most, with social studies and engineering in between; this is not unique to Berkeley), so they get the worst of all worlds – less grade inflation worsening medical school admission chances, courses which are more work (labs and such), and poor job and career prospects if they do not get into medical school.</p>
<p>An interesting study on grade distribution in EE and CS courses, for EECS and L&S CS majors, from 1999:</p>
<p>[Grade</a> Distributions for EECS and LSCS Students](<a href=“http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/report/index.html]Grade”>http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/report/index.html)</p>
<p>Note: L&S CS was capped at the time. Also, [url=<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/Ucberkeley.html]gradeinflation.com[/url”>UC-Berkeley]gradeinflation.com[/url</a>] says that Berkeley’s average GPA was 3.12 in 1997 and 3.24 in 2005 (it does not list any years in between). Transfer students rarely arrive with the full set of lower division EE and CS courses, since most of them are not offered at community colleges.</p>
<p>Some observations:</p>
<p>a. L&S CS majors generally did better than EECS majors.
b. D or F made up only about 5% or less of EE and CS grades.
c. Transfer students generally did worse on average, but did not get D or F any more frequently.
d. Oddly, lower division CS grade averages were significantly higher than upper division CS grade averages. Seems like “weeding” was not actually being done.
e. EE grade averages were about the same for lower division and upper division for non-transfer students; transfer students did worse in upper division than lower division.
f. More plain grades (e.g. A, B, C) were given than + or - of the same grades (e.g. more B grades than B+ grades, and more B grades than B- grades).</p>
<p>I’m thinking about getting my MBA after graduating. Will a deflated GPA reduce my chances of getting into a top business school? I mean, can’t they look at GPA relatively, and see how I did compared to others in my graduating class?</p>
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<p>Im guessing you weren’t an engineer, nor did you go through the engineering weeders. You really think that social studies and engineering are in the middle of the grade inflation spectrum? Engineering is probably more grade deflated than the sciences. Really, what happens in the hardcore sciences, like say physics or chemistry, is that many of the courses are crosslisted with engineering classes. Here are some easy sciences to consider:</p>
<p>Earth and Planetary Sciences
Integrative Biology
Plant Biology
<insert biology=“” program=“” thats=“” not=“” mcb=“”>
…etc. </insert></p>
<p>So there are soft science majors. Can you name any soft engineering majors? Even IEOR is pretty tough given you have to take engineering weeders and compete with Haas kids. And the real problem with engineering, despite the workload, is the projects. In true engineering fashion, classes will be heavily based on technical projects that coincide with finals. Take BioE104 for example. It had the standard midterm, 3 hour final, weekly problem sets, labs, and final project. Thats crammed into 4 units. </p>
<p>Now to your point about job prospects with a degree in the basic sciences. These fields don’t necessarily have poor job outlook, but necessitate a graduate degree. In fact, some of these jobs, might even be what the students like to do (ie. get a graduate degree and consult for the government on managing marshlands, monitoring seismic activity, preventing soil erosion, the list goes on). </p>
<p>However, I generally agree with your point that science majors tend to have lower job prospects and lower GPAS, having a doubly saddening effect. Since Berkeley anyway curves most of their classes, they could start by curving each major to the same GPA. This is still not a perfect system, because certain majors attract smarter, more hardworking people, and feature a more time-intensive curriculum. However, its still better than having the highest GPAs awarded to the majors with the generally more apathetic students.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure its a ploy by administrators in other departments to attract these pre-law pre-med students to boost their enrollment, and consequent funding.</p>
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<p>Or, I suppose, betting your undergraduate study on landing a high-paying job in consulting or finance. Interestingly, many of the better performing Berkeley engineering students that I know would not even take engineering jobs at all, but would instead take jobs in consulting or finance. Higher performing liberal arts students can do and have done the same. </p>
<p>The other strategy is to develop marketable skills on your own time. By choosing a creampuff major, you can earn strong grades with little studying, hence enjoying vast quantities of spare time that you can devote towards developing marketable skills outside of the classroom. For example, I know a guy who majored in a humanity at Berkeley, while also learning Web programming in his spare time, which he supplemented with part-time jobs building websites and web applications. By the time of graduation, he was a savvy web programmer with an impressive portfolio of prior work, and was actually garnering higher-paying job offers than many of the actual CS/EECS graduates. {As to why he didn’t just major in CS/EECS, his interest in programming wasn’t sparked until he was already well into his major by which time it was a bit late to switch majors, and, frankly, he was also repulsed by the CS grading curves. Furthermore, the CS program surprisingly teaches relatively little Web programming and provides few opportunities to develop a portfolio of practical projects.} He’s now an award-winning software developer at his employer, despite not actually holding a CS degree. </p>
<p>I have similarly recommended that more Berkeley students should become IT workers. The vast majority of IT workers, at least that I know, were not talented enough to be admitted to high ranked colleges and do not even hold technical degrees, or often times hold no college degree at all (with a few never even graduating from high school). Yet they make highly respectable salaries encompassing well over 6 figures with sufficient experience. A typical Berkeley student could probably become a Cisco certified CCIE with 3-6 months of full-time study or 1-2 years of part-time study, and that extra time would be readily available via a creampuff major that places few demands on one’s time. </p>
<p>One could also even develop practical skills within the Berkeley classroom, but through a P/NP basis. For example, one of the most promising courses I have ever seen is [Statistics 133](<a href=“http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/classes/s133/resources.html”>http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/classes/s133/resources.html</a>) which, rather than bogging students down in (unmarketable) theoretical statistical formula, instead teaches students how to obtain, parse, organize, and mine actual real-world datasets and then present results, using actual software that is widely utilized within industry. You will learn R, surely the most widely utilized open-source statistical software standard in the world. {And once you’re versed in R, then learning a commercial stat package such as Stata or SAS is relatively simple.} You will learn MySQL, Tcl, and CGI - technologies that are widely utilized throughout industry to organize and manipulate databases. Perhaps most importantly- the class has no prereqs. Anybody, even a humanities student with no prior computing or statistical training, could take this course. Those who are worried about the grading could simply take it on a P/NP basis, or heck, even sit in on it without actually taking it. Frankly, I think everybody should take or at least sit in on this course, and Berkeley should vastly increase the number of seats for the course. </p>
<p>Now, to be sure, I obviously don’t claim that you will develop sufficiently marketable skills to land a high-paying job via a single course alone. However, the course will provide you with a foundation upon which you can build those skills. The hardest part of learning any software skillset is the starting point; once you’ve learned enough to implement basic functionality, it’s not particularly difficult to develop additional skills that builds upon that foundation. For example, once you’ve learned how to use R to import, manipulate, and calculate basic statistical regressions on simple datasets, it’s not that hard to learn how to analyze more complex data. </p>
<p>One could then take on research projects that rely solely on statistical data analysis, perhaps as part of a widely praised undergraduate thesis that has drawn nationwide media [attention</a>](<a href=“http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/03/15/michael-lewiss-the-big-short-read-the-harvard-thesis-instead/]attention”>http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/03/15/michael-lewiss-the-big-short-read-the-harvard-thesis-instead/) and has now been placed on the reading list of an economics course. One could perform a fun statistical analysis on topics of personal interest, and even have it published in a peer-reviewed journal, such as a statistical analysis of the social network of [url=<a href=“http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0511215]rappers[/url”>[physics/0511215] The Network of Collaboration Among Rappers and its Community Structure]rappers[/url</a>]. {Apparently, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, and 2Pac are heavily ‘connected’ rappers.} Or one could simply find a job that requires statistical data analysis skills - nowadays companies are swimming in data and just don’t know what to do with it. {Heck, the supposed value-add of most consulting firms is usually to provide that analysis.} </p>
<p>The upshot is that plenty of avenues exist for students in creampuff majors to develop highly marketable skills outside the classroom - or even through judicious choices within the classroom. One merely has to make wise choices with the large dollops of spare time that the creampuff major provides. The ‘ingenious’ aspect of the strategy is that you can do so without ever having to jeopardize your GPA. For example, if you attempt to learn Web programming or Cisco networking skills in your spare time yet perform poorly - for example, if you earn the worst score in the history of the CCIE certification exam - nobody will ever know about it. Indeed, most CCIE’s fail the certification exams multiple times before they finally pass, but that’s harmless because evidence of your failures is not recorded. In contrast, if you take engineering courses and earn poor grades, those poor grades are indelibly marked on your academic record for life.</p>
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<p>Well, actually, the better answer seems to be that the dataset suffers from the pervasively invidious problem of statistical selection bias due to truncation; it doesn’t record the results of the students who drop the class, probably because they know they will receive poor grades. Those who have taken the lower-division weeders will surely remember that the number of students enrolled at the end of the course will be substantially smaller than the number of students enrolled at the beginning, as many students will have jumped, particularly after viewing their grades from the first midterm. What happens to those students? They should be evidenced by either a large bump of ‘F’ grades denoting those students who would have failed had they stayed in the class (because they got scores of zero on every assignment and exam after they had dropped, hence surely failing had they stayed in the course), or by a specific category of ‘drops’. The data shows neither, indicating that selection bias is likely rampant.</p>
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<p>Again, I would reiterate that for B-school programs - whether an MBA or PhD - courses and their accompanying grading don’t really matter all that much. What matters, again, is work experience and interviews/essays for the former and research potential for the latter.</p>
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<p>What truly matters for getting into top business school is that you have excellent work experience, preferably at an elite firm. I suppose obtaining such a job offer is GPA-dependent (depends on the employer), but once you have it, your grades matter little.</p>
<p>Sakky, </p>
<p>This is one of the few times I’ve had some doubts about one of your posts, if you are also talking about engineering PhDs. I agree 100 percent that research potential is very important, but you also need the grades. PHD programs heavily consider grades and courses “up to a point”. First of all, you need a 3.2 to even apply to some mid-tier programs, which as you seem know is not something you can take for granted in Berkeley engineering.</p>
<p>If you have applied to graduate school, you would know that the technical courses you take are listed on your application, right down to the instructor and textbook used! Its well known that graduate schools will see if you’ve taken any courses in your prospective research area or fluff humanities courses.</p>
<p>Now when I said “up to a point” I mean that once you get above a certain threshold, your grades become less relevant and its all about research potential. That threshold is heavily dependent on the school. At Berkeley it seems to be around a 3.5 for top PhD programs, but at State School XYZ, you probably need to be close to a department topper to elicit consideration. </p>
<p>So you’ll see people from Berkeley consistently getting in to top graduate schools with GPA’s around (and under in my case) 3.5. This is more of a function of application committees correcting for grade deflated schools and strong engineering programs as well as focusing on your major and technical gpa. This does not mean that PhD programs are less about grades! An off the radar state school graduate in a weak/new department may not get this kind of GPA correction. </p>
<p>I think you erroneously view it as GPA leniency, its GPA correction! So for graduate school, the “game” as it will really favors those who go to strong programs because:</p>
<p>a) its slightly easier to get a decent GPA at a top school than a stellar GPA at a lower ranked school. This is not so much of difficulty, but say, if you’re sick for a semester/quarter and bomb some finals, you wouldn’t be out of the game if you were at Berkeley.</p>
<p>b) Much much easier to demonstrate research potential at a research institution.</p>
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<p>I think I actually made it quite clear that in the last few posts I was talking about business graduate programs (whether MBA or PhD). MBA programs care mostly about work experience and “leadership/managerial potential” (however defined), whereas business PhD programs are highly research-oriented.</p>
<p>Furthermore, undergrad business coursework, or even MBA coursework, surprisingly, bear little relationship with business PhD programs or with business academia in general. Earning high grades in such coursework therefore provides little information about whether somebody will succeed within a business PhD program beyond general information about work ethic. Research and resulting familiarity with what management academic journals want - or heck, even knowing the names of the top management academic journals (which practically nobody outside of academia has ever heard of or cares about) - is crucial. Somebody with a relatively low undergrad GPA (say around 3.0, or perhaps even less) but with an established research record in publishing or at least attaining ‘revise-and-resubmits’ (R&R) in top-tier mgmt academic journals is a far stronger candidate for top business PhD programs than somebody with a 4.0 but no research, if, for no other reason, because the faculty knows that starting from the very first day, they will be able to coauthor with the former to improve their own pub record. The latter will take years to become ‘research-savvy’, if he ever does at all.</p>
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<p>Yes, I did study engineering at Berkeley. As far as the social studies and engineering being between sciences and humanities on grade inflation, that was from gradeinflation.com for universities in the US generally (not Berkeley specific). But note that engineering students do take mostly science in lower division.</p>
<p>The Hilfinger 1999 study does indicate that EECS majors’ EE and CS grades were within 0.1 of their overall grades, except that their lower division CS grades were higher than their overall grades.</p>
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<p>Are you saying “easy” in terms of grade inflation, competition, workload, or (lack of) difficulty in understanding and learning the material (for majors’ courses, not the “10” courses for non-majors)? Note that most of the concentrations in the Earth and Planetary Science major do require Math 53 and 54 and Physics 7A and 7B, which are the same lower division courses that engineering majors take. The biology majors get to compete with grade-grubbing pre-meds.</p>
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<p>Self-education is nothing new; it is just that most people don’t do it, which is why there are schools of all types. Anecdotal evidence of successful self-educated people does not invalidate the usefulness of the more usual types of education for other people in the field.</p>
<p>(Also, you might say that many Berkeley students and probably others are capable of doing a CCIE, but how many of them are motivated to do so, even if they had all the time in the world?)</p>
<p><a href=“Also,%20you%20might%20say%20that%20many%20Berkeley%20students%20and%20probably%20others%20are%20capable%20of%20doing%20a%20CCIE,%20but%20how%20many%20of%20them%20are%20motivated%20to%20do%20so,%20even%20if%20they%20had%20all%20the%20time%20in%20the%20world?”>quote</a>
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<p>Well, surely we have seen plenty of people who are evidently motivated to major in engineering despite having little inherent love for the discipline, but just because they want a marketable degree. To inject a possibly controversial racial point, why are the engineering majors at Berkeley so heavily dominated by Asians, to the point that the classes might actually be more comprehensible to the students if taught in Chinese rather than English? Is it because Asians just inherently (biologically) love engineering? Or does it more have to do with Asian cultural and parental pressures to choose a major that provides a professional career pathway? {One might argue that imperfect language skills among new Asian immigrants might also compel them to choose technical majors for which mathematics is the underpinning universal ‘language’, but that doesn’t explain why so few Asians choose to major in Asian Languages or Asian Studies. Far more white students at Berkeley choose to major in English than Asian students who choose to major in an Asian language.} The cultural preprofessional bent also seems explains Asians disproportionately becoming prelaws or premeds. </p>
<p>The point is, plenty of people are motivated to learn topics they don’t even particularly inherently enjoy, simply due to cultural pressures. If Asian parents were to discover the IT gravy train, you’d better believe that armies of Asian kids would storm the CCIE ranks. </p>
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<p>And given the selection-bias issue that I previously discussed, I don’t know what to make of this assertion. Such bias almost certainly is more prevalent within the lower division, as that it is during the lower division when students are likeliest to attempt to switch majors if they are not performing to their expectations. {For example, if you’re a freshman or software who is receiving abysmal scores in your lower-division CS coursework, you’re probably going to try to switch out of the major entirely. I know I would.} In contrast, once you’ve made it to the upper-division, you’re far more locked into the major.</p>
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<p>Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure that holds even for engineering. If your research skills have advanced to the point that you’re already actively publishing, particularly in A-level academic journals, and especially as first or even sole author, it’s very hard for me to see how or why a top engineering grad program would reject you even with mediocre grades. Like I said, it seems to me that what academic departments, including engineering departments, want most of all are new graduate students who can immediately improve the faculty’s chances of publication through collaboration, along with somebody who is going to place well on the (hopefully academic) job market. All of that is clearly demonstrated by an applicant who is already publishing top papers.</p>
<p>@ sakky: How many people do you know that got into top graduate programs with a GPA in the low 3’s? </p>
<p>For example, at Berkeley itself, a 3.5 is needed to even apply for the 5th year masters in EECS. </p>
<p>Point is, in research you can do what your adviser tells you to do and possibly get a paper out of it, or you can be a go-getter and make your own publication. I think if you have a suspect GPA they assume the former. </p>
<p>And lets face it, professors recommendations, while important, can be inaccurate because the professors are often preoccupied with other things. </p>
<p>So really the only “hard” thing in a graduate application is the GPA, everything else is “soft” stuff.</p>
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<p>But for the purposes of PhD programs, GPA is itself ‘soft’ - indeed arguably the ‘softest’ portion of the application in the sense that it conveys very little information about how strong of a researcher the candidate is. And ultimately, within a PhD program, and within academia as a whole - which any PhD program is supposed to be targeting as a career path - research is all that matters. Nobody in academia will ever care what your GPA was, either undergrad or grad. All they will care about is the quality of your publication record. </p>
<p>Anybody who’s been around academia can surely think of numerous people who had stellar GPA’s but simply couldn’t overcome the research hurdle, which usually means not even being able to finish the PhD at all. Consuming and understanding knowledge is far different from producing new knowledge. </p>
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<p>But I’m not sure that the distinction matters. Either way, you’ve proved that you know how to ‘play the publication game’. You know how to write a paper of publishable quality in an A-level journal - and we are assuming that you are publishing in an A-level - and you know how to satisfy the concerns of editors and referees. in the world of academia, that, frankly, is far more valuable than high grades. Like I said, if nothing else, many departments will want to admit you simply because faculty will probably want to collaborate with you, or at least pick your brain, so that they too can publish in that same A-level journal that you did. </p>
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<p>I suspect that, for reasons stated above, that requirement is highly permeable for applicants who are already successfully publishing. But even if not, there is nothing that states that you have to go to Berkeley specifically. A number of top graduate programs exist; surely one will admit you if you have already been successfully publishing. </p>
<p>The point is, at the end of the day, research/publishing is by far the most valued activity within academia, and any undergrad who can prove that they can do that is going to be a prize applicant, regardless of whatever other deficiencies he may have. </p>
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<p>I never said that it was commonplace - indeed, the ability to understand information is surely highly correlated with the ability to produce new information. Any strong researcher is likely to have also been a strong student. </p>
<p>But the point is, the two are not necessarily linked and actual research/pub prowess is far more prized than is pure ‘student’ prowess.</p>
<p>@ Sakky:</p>
<p>After spending a year in a lab, I think any reasonable undergrad should be able to write an A-level paper. Remember, this is engineering, not pure mathematics. So you can, and actually often have, reasonably smart students who have gotten very lucky with collected data. Often, in an established lab, undergrads will just copy the lines that graduate students and postdocs take. Thus, research potential, as evaluated at the undergrad level is “soft” because its often a function of:</p>
<p>a) mentoring strength. Most undergrads I know of just follow a grad student around and do the grunt work. Because of their grunt work they often get a publication.
b) which lab the undergrad chooses to join
c) the element of luck in research, which is always there.</p>
<p>Finally, another indication that a high upper division GPA itself is tantamount to research potential is that many/most upper-division engineering classes at Berkeley have you write a paper that comprises the bulk of your grade. This paper is in journal format and is graded by a research professor. So GPA, especially the upper-div GPA that programs look at, is highly correlated with research potential at a research school like Berkeley. </p>
<p>By the way, students are accepted at top programs without any publications, and often with very little research experience. This happens quite often actually, because these students have very high GPAs at top schools. </p>
<p>For what its worth a lab technician who graduated Berkeley 3 years ago and has been doing fulltime postbac research with 2 first-author publications in A-level journals was only accepted to the same school he had done the postbac research in due to grades. If he had better grades, he would have been in anywhere.</p>
<p>Regardless, I generally agree with you, in that there is some flex for brilliant candidates who have proven themselves through research. However, a poor GPA will not get a candidate into a top program, no matter the strength of his research, unless he back-doors/networks his way in by meeting a professor at a conference and having that professor push for him.</p>
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<p>Now I’m afraid I have to emphatically disagree. Many/most upper-division Berkeley engineering courses requiring writing a paper in journal format? Exactly which ones? I know I never had one, nor can I think of a single engineer who actually did. Note, to be clear, a few such courses may indeed exist, but they seem to be clearly in the majority. Heck, I would submit that the overwhelming majority of Berkeley engineering graduates don’t even know what ‘journal format’ even is. </p>
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<p>And it is for the above reason that I continue to maintain however soft you may think research output may be, GPA is even softer. Sure, publication success is highly luck-driven. Nobody is arguing otherwise. On the other hand, as I said, GPA has little if anything to do with research success. Nobody in academia will ever care about your GPA. Like I said, high GPA is a function of your understanding of the material (and ability to beat the curve). It says practically nothing about whether you can generate new material. </p>
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<p>But now it seems as if you’ve contradicted yourself. You said before that any ‘reasonable’ undergrad could obtain an A-level pub in just one year. That is an assertion to which I must emphatically disagree, having known many ‘more-than-reasonable’ students who have worked in labs for years yet lack even a single pub, let alone an A-level. But let’s assume it’s true anyway. Now you’re contending that students are accepted to top programs without any pubs (to which I agree). But how does that square with your assertion above. Why don’t these applicants have any A-level pubs? Are they not ‘reasonable’ students? If so, why are these programs admitting ‘unreasonable’ students? </p>
<p>The far more parsimonious explanation is that most applicants to top academic programs have no impressive pub record whatsoever. Even after admitting the small minority students who do have such a record, the programs still have numerous slots to fill, and the only criteria they can then use is GPA, which while clearly soft, is better than nothing at all. </p>
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<p>But now you’ve implicitly changed the terms of debate. Implicit within any discussion of a pub record is the amount of time you spent to obtain those pubs. For example, it may be highly impressive for a graduating engineering PhD student on the academic job market to have 10 A-level pubs. That’s far less impressive for an associate professor up for tenure review. The latter is supposed to have far more, perhaps by an order of magnitude, by virtue of how much longer has had been in the game. </p>
<p>Similarly, a lab tech with 3 years of full-time research experience, frankly, should have more than 2 A-levels. However, an undergraduate having even a single A-level is a notable achievement, for as you noted, the vast majority of undergrads have zero. I struggle to think of even a single engineer who actually had an A-level pub by the time he graduated. </p>
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<p>But that’s a major caveat you just laid out right there, and indeed, that is how I suspect that most grad admissions are performed. Whoever you had been coauthoring with is clearly going to be strongly pushing for your admission to his program, if for no other reason, so that he can continue his collaboration with you. If one faculty member strongly endorses one candidate, it is hard for the rest of the adcom - who is comprised mostly of faculty themselves -to deny him.</p>
<p>Sakky, I don’t want to really list out all the classes, but in BioE more than half of the upper-div classes are cross-registered for graduate level classes so I’ve had to put out journal spec publications.In fact, one such final project was published in a top journal. This may be different in EECS where I do concede it is more exam based, however, my microfab. class had a final paper writeup, IEEE form.</p>
<p>Either way its somewhat of representative of both research fields–EECS is slightly more analytical/quantitative which explains the exams while BioE is slightly more experimental. In a sense, a BioE, can get by with diligence and less aptitude because you can look up PubMed for reference material, say the mechanism of anaerobic metabolism in <insert organism=“”>, or the success rate of gene therapy in african males aged 18-30, or whatever. In EECS, looking at many of the technical papers is not going to help much, unless you really understand the math/physics side of it. If you walk into a research facility for both fields here is what you’ll see:</insert></p>
<p>EECS students will have a lot of textbooks on their desk to help with their work. Papers won’t typically have the full mathematical basis and may only have a snippet or simplified equation form.</p>
<p>BioE’s will typically have tons of papers/journals each documenting highly specific scenarios, often clinical. You typically won’t see textbooks on a BioE’s desk.</p>
<p>Now, with regards to our lab tech. A lab tech getting 2 first author publications in 3 years is actually doing a very good job, especially if they are in amazing journals. To deny that implies you don’t have too much experience in research. More than anything, somebody who takes a lab tech job, clearly shows great commitment to research since he is forgoing higher salaries elsewhere as well as professional programs. He’s not going to be one of those PhD’s that master out. In engineering, I feel that its this commitment that’s more important than intelligence. So by that logic, our labtech should have been admitted elsewhere besides his backdoor institution, Berkeley. For comparison, he got rejected from very low-tier programs. </p>
<p>This backdoor works great at top research institutions like Berkeley or MIT, but what if you go to a lesser known school as an undergrad and maybe even get cozy with faculty there? Its unlikely to help that much for mid-tier or high-tier programs since the faculty there typically only have pull at that institution. And lets not forget those departments like Berkeley ChemE that don’t even allow their own undergrads in the program. </p>
<p>Undergrads getting publications is not as uncommon as you think. Nowadays, I feel that more and more engineers are prepping for graduate school rather than the work environment. From my completely anecdotal evidence of the undergrads who I have done research with over 4 years, I would say that 20% got a publication. This is including students who are kind of just doing the motions in lab, not even expecting a publication, but doing it to get letters of reference. If you want a publication as an undergrad, you can get one, but it will take about 1-2 years for manuscript submission.</p>
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<p>Actually, it then seems as if BioE is a clear anomaly, and indeed is a clear and recent anomaly. {I know a number of former Berkeley BioE graduates, and none of them had to write a single paper of journal-quality as part of their coursework.} But that’s why I invite any other engineers - current and past - to report how many upper-division courses of their required writing publication-style papers, and I am confident that the percentage is going to be small. </p>
<p>But in any case, what cannot be disputed is that EECS has significantly more students than BioE does, which means that the curricula formats of the EECS major must be weighted more heavily than is BioE in terms of capturing an overall view of Berkeley engineering coursework actually undertaken by the students. </p>
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<p>Actually, the differences between the two career tracks is far more fundamental. BioE, whether we like it or not, is mostly a research-oriented career. It is for this reason that, let’s face it, you basically need a PhD or at least an MS, for the BioE BS degree is not particularly marketable, being usually the lowest paying of all engineering disciplines. {Granted, Civil Engineering had an unusually penurious year in 2010, but in most years, even the CivilE’s garner higher pay than do the BioE’s). </p>
<p>In stark contrast, EECS and most other engineering disciplines provide a well-established career pathway right out of undergrad. Most EECS students - even at a research-oriented university such as Berkeley - are not interested in research and never need to be. The EECS industry has a plethora of slots available to those with just BS degrees with which to add value without ever once having to engage in the research process. Of the numerous EECS BS graduates that I know that never proceeded to graduate school, only a tiny handful have ever once read an academic research paper, or would even want to do so. They do not work in research settings, and never intend to.</p>
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<p>Um, I am confident that my familiarity with the research process is fairly strong. </p>
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<p>Let’s be clear about what I said. The (implicit) question is not whether he is doing a fine job on an absolute basis. The question is whether he is doing well enough to be admitted to a top engineering graduate program, for which the level of competition is high. I would say that if you wanted to be competitive for admissions to a top program, you probably need to have more than 2 A-level pubs after 3 years of full-time lab work. </p>
<p>After all, like it or not, the world of academia judges people not just on their total research output, but also crucially on the time (or at least the perceived time) they had to produce that output. Like I said, a newly minted PhD with 10 A-level pubs would be a top tenure-track job market candidate, but an associate professor undergoing tenure-review with 10 A-level pubs would be judged to be subpar at most top departments, and indeed, would probably be dismissed so that the department could make an offer to that aforementioned new PhD. As iniquitous as such a system may seem, that is how it works. Similarly, a 3-year lab tech with 2 A-level pubs may well be judged as being worse than a new college graduate with no pubs, under the notion that the latter might have more than 2 pubs if he were to work for 3 years as a lab tech. In other words, academia judges people not only by their absolute research output but also for their option value. </p>
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<p>Well, in his case, I frankly find it hard to feel sorry for him. Oh well, so he had to “settle” for graduate school at Berkeley - something for which the overwhelming majority of engineering grad school applicants around the world would gladly take. </p>
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<p>For all of my tussles with the ChemE program, I must admit that the situation is hardly as tragic as you make it out to be. Plenty of Berkeley ChemE’s are indeed admitted right back into Berkeley for graduate school…in Material Science, which is such a closely related cousin of ChemE to the point that it’s exceedingly difficult to delineate a hard boundary between the two disciplines. I also cannot deny that the Berkeley undergrad ChemE program has built a rather productive pipeline of graduates - including a number who I never thought to be strong performers - to a certain ChemE grad program in Palo Alto. </p>
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<p>The question is not whether they can obtain some pub - I readily agree that it’s fairly trivial to obtain ‘mid-listing’ on a laundry list of authors for some C-level, or perhaps even B-level pub. But such work conveys little value as the coin of the academic realm. What you really want are A-level pubs, and with prominent authorship credit - ideally first-author-listing. That is something that I highly doubt that 20% of Berkeley engineering undergrads engaged in research can obtain. {Heck, the true value is probably closer to 2% than to 20%.}</p>