<p>berkeley does a survey of its freshmen every year and asks them about their major/intended major. something like 12% (i seem to recall, but i might be wrong) of freshmen say they are going for business, but if you look at how many people apply their sophomore year, the number's dropped to about 8% of the class. then around 4% get in.</p>
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[quote]
I'd say it's easier to get a 3.6 in Haas prereqs than a 2.0 in engineering.
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</p>
<p>haha, I'd probably agree with you, except 2.0? Maybe 2.7 eh...</p>
<p>By the way, this makes us non-engineers feel great about ourselves</p>
<p>Yeah I wouldn’t call rhetoric easy - you should try reading and analyzing post-structuralist theory and then applying it. You’ll be reading paragraphs OVER and OVER and OVER again. You have to EARN an A. Trust me.</p>
<p>p.s. same with mass comm - the core classes and classes in the major require a high level of analytical ability. Oh, and the people in the department are amazing teachers. It’s a GREAT reason to come to Cal.</p>
<p>I heard Rhetoric was hard…?</p>
<p>It really depends on your strengths and weaknesses. Some people are better at writing, and others are better at crunching numbers. It’s not exactly fair to compare liberal arts majors with technical majors.</p>
<p>But if you want a raw, objective comparison, the average GPA by department is ranked on The Campus Buddy.</p>
<p>How are the earth sciences? I’m thinking about geology or marine science. Are there a lot of people in these majors?</p>
<p>^Student^ got it right. </p>
<p>I’d like to see a whiz kid engineer try and write an elegant piece of well-crafted, cleverly styled prose for an upper division English class and watch them cry when they get back their first D. </p>
<p>This is all just apples and oranges.</p>
<p>Easiest: Peace and conflicts studies</p>
<p>Hardest: EECS, ChemE, BioE, MCB</p>
<p>mcb isn’t on the same level as eecs chem3 and bioe.</p>
<p>I would say that it is, in that the level of competition is far higher between people, due to the high number of premeds. I’ve noticed in general that the engineers are more willing to help out each other with work.</p>
<p>OP, use campusbuddy.com they breakdown the major by GPA. I would say MCB is an extremely stressful major not necessarily because the major itself is extremely difficult, but it’s essentially a 1000 Berkeley pre-med students fighting to get the top 5-10% GPA in order to get into a top med-school.</p>
<p>MCB is more about memorization, especially in the introductory bio classes (1A-1B.) EECS (or any other engineering major) is more about understanding (difficult) concepts. Some people are better at one than the other, and as such, they can’t really be compared. </p>
<p>Indeed, many engineering exams are open book or open notes/cheatsheet, but if you don’t understand the material, you won’t be able to get the curveballs that the professors throw at you on the exams. Believe it or not, some engineers are horrible when it comes to cramming their heads with vocabulary and other tidbits of information.</p>
<p>How is MechE hard? I am going to do that this fall. What do you guys think is the ranking of majors in Engineering? I know EECS is the hardest, but what about the others like CivE, Industrial Operations and research, materials engineering, nuclear…etc</p>
<p>how about Political Economy of Industrial Societies (PEIS)?</p>
<p>Anyone know how hard that is?</p>
<p>When you guys say EECS is difficult, is it the upper division classes that make it difficult or the lower division ones? I am very nervous now since I will in the program as a transfer this fall. Do EECS classes use a lot of Quantum Physics? I found modern physics pretty difficult to grasp.</p>
<p>@huangyun: Both upper-div and lower-div classes in EECS are intellectually challenging. Most transfer students have a hard time in their first semester here as they find Berkeley’s classes to be much more demanding than the community college counterparts.</p>
<p>But here’s the good news: as far as I know, EECS classes don’t use quantum mechanics that much. If you’re going in the CS direction, then no quantum mechanics at all.</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread. Of course, it poses an unanswerable question, because there is no objective means of gauging how difficult a major is. (Case in point: I’m a Physics major who is currently struggling in an International and Area Studies class.)</p>
<p>I’ve decided to post data from College Buddy’s list of departments ranked by GPA. Again, these numbers mean little irrespective of the students who take the courses. (I.e. Plenty of non-biology majors take biology, and plenty of non-physics majors take physics.) </p>
<p>I think you’ll find some of these numbers surprising.</p>
<p>GPA: 2.70-2.80
Biology (1A/1B), Mathematics</p>
<p>GPA: 2.80-2.90
Statistics, Tibetan</p>
<p>GPA: 2.90-3.00
Molecular and Cellular Biology</p>
<p>GPA: 3.00-3.10
Physics, Legal Studies, Computer Science, American Studies, Economics, Chemistry, College Writing</p>
<p>GPA: 3.10-3.20
Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Interdisciplinary Studies, Engineering, Cognitive Science</p>
<p>GPA: 3.20-3.30
Environmental Economics & Policy, Architecture, Chemical Engineering, Philosophy, International and Area Studies, Political Economy of Industrial Societies, Mass Communications, Astronomy, Materials Science & Engineering, Political Science, History, Plant & Microbial Biology, African-American Studies</p>
<p>GPA: 3.30-3.40
Sociology, Linguistics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geography, History of Art, Anthropology, Psychology, Integrative Biology, Latin American Studies, Development Studies, Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, Business, Film Studies, English, New Media, LGBT Studies, Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology, Peace & Conflict Studies, Environmental Science, Asian Studies</p>
<p>GPA: 3.40-3.50
Sanskrit, Rhetoric, Southeast Asian Studies, Spanish, Classics, Celtic Studies, EPSM, Environmental Design, Energy and Resources, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Comparative Literature, Letters and Science, Nuclear Engineering, Chicano Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, Latin, Scandinavian</p>
<p>GPA: 3.50-3.60
Greek, Earth & Planetary Science, Bioengineering, Ethnic Studies, Social Welfare, Dutch, City & Regional Planning, Religious Studies, Native American Studies, Theater & Dance, French, Middle Eastern Studies, Landscape Architecture, Asian American Studies</p>
<p>GPA: 3.60-3.70
Chinese, Journalism, Italian, Public Policy, Japanese, Portuguese, Slavic Languages & Literature, Public Health, Music, South Asian Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Vision Science, Military Affairs</p>
<p>GPA: 3.70-3.80
Visual Studies, Punjabi, Military Science, Arabic, Practice of Art, Eurasian Studies, German, UGIS, Education</p>
<p>GPA: 3.80-3.90
Hindi-Urdu, Hebrew, Korean, Malay-Indonesian, Physical Education</p>
<p>GPA: 3.90-4.00
Tagalog, Thai, Persian, Vietnamese</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, upper.</p>
<p>You may find yourselves comfortably scoring 1 stdev above average on EE20 and EE40 exams, and then struggling to scrape the mean in upper-division classes. (This happened to me.)</p>
<p>The reason for this is simple: the students who continue on to upper-division coursework are already self-selected due to heavy weeding out in the lower-division. You’re not going to find someone who floundered through the CS 61 series going on to take CS 170. Yet, the grading curves are, on average, only raised by about 0.2-0.3 of a grade point, making it much harder to grab A’s, A-'s, and even B+'s.</p>
<p>In addition, the upper-division coursework is conceptually much more difficult, and accompanied by gigantic projects that will take you dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete. Worse yet, these heavy projects are often graded quite generously so that they have little effect on the curve if you complete them, yet they will crush you if you fail to perform up to class standards.</p>
<p>Since you’re a transfer, you’ll have to take the lower-division core, comprised of CS 61A, CS 61C, EE 20, and EE 40. If you find yourself struggling with any of these, switch majors immediately. I’ve seen too many transfer students flounder through the lower-division weeders and then go on to get crushed in the upper-division–and by then, their GPAs are way too low for them to switch to any other major. (On a more encouraging note, however, some of the best and brightest students in the department are also transfers, so needless to say, their intellectual abilities span a very wide spectrum.)</p>
<p>No, EECS classes do not use quantum physics unless you take the 110 series.</p>
<p>What about environmental economics & policy, and the other CNR majors…? I’m really interested in environmental sciences, but I don’t want to go to college and not be challenged by my classes; I want to learn and improve my mind a hellish amount. Will eep do this or should I look into other majors, like, idk, bio-engineering?</p>