Econ 1 Olney

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>Grades are up. Any idea what the curve for a hard A is like?</p>

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<p>my guess would be 410-420 out of 500 total points for the lowest A, but I could be wrong.</p>

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<p>That’s not right … I have a 422 and an A-. I’m quite amazed it’s not a hard A.</p>

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<p>wow, that is surprising. you should prob email your gsi.</p>

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<p>Well, I’m just trying to figure out what the curve was before I do that.</p>

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<p>that sucks. maybe you just had a hard gsi. who was your gsi btw?</p>

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<p>437/500 = A, so I imagine you were fairly close :(</p>

<p>swishshooter, one of our valuable members here, said [in</a> another topic](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-berkeley/647168-has-anyone-taken-econ-prof-olney.html]in”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-berkeley/647168-has-anyone-taken-econ-prof-olney.html) that 413 was the A- cutoff for his TA last year.</p>

<p>For my section, the exam 1 distribution was 59-65-71 (25th-50th-75th percentile, respectively) and the exam 2 distribution was 63-69-74. I don’t know what the stats for the final are, but a lot of people collaborated on the essay for an easy 50+ points.</p>

<p>Given the numbers above, 422/500 would imply an ~80% average on the exams. I agree that getting an A- for that is kind of harsh–but Olney is known for her “draconian” curve (14% A+/A in 2008) :(</p>

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<p>Interesting. I’d have expected it to be a lot lower since the mean on the exams for me was 66 for the first one, 69 for the second one.</p>

<p>In any case, Olney’s grading doesn’t seem to be in line with regular curved grading - <a href=“http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/The_Normal_Distribution.svg/800px-The_Normal_Distribution.svg.png[/url]”>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/The_Normal_Distribution.svg/800px-The_Normal_Distribution.svg.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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That sounds comparable to my section, then.</p>

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</a>
You’re right–it’s not a perfect normal distribution. But then again, grading curves are rarely normally-distributed in practice.</p>

<p>Anyway, if I were in your shoes, I’d email my TA anyway–one, it can’t hurt; and two, you have the right to know how your grade was computed.</p>

<p>Two years ago, I did manage to get a grade change in a finance class. There was some kind of a clerical error and I managed to get an A- bumped up to an A.</p>

<p>Good luck!</p>

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<p>I’m an incoming freshmen. How tough will it be to take econ 1 my first semester at Cal?</p>

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<p>Train’s teaching the class in Fall - he’s much better than Olney IMO.</p>

<p>@Student: Sent my GSI an email. Thanks.</p>

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<p>Did anybody find out what the lowest A- in term of points was?</p>

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<p>I’m taking econ this semester with moretti. Have you heard anything about him? Also, which gsi would you recommend? I see that as of now, Xia, Dandavate, Zhang, Milivojevic, Tipoe, Nakagawa, Zhang, Guo, and Roach are all listed for the course. Thanks so much!</p>