Hi I will be a freshman at Berkeley in the upcoming Fall. I took AP microeconomics in high school and did very well in the class. I figured I will know as much econ now as I do ever, so i Phase 1’ed Econ 1. However, many people strongly advised against this. Is econ 1 with Olney really that difficult that I should not take it first semester? Thanks. Should I get acclimated to Berkeley first?
Why do (CalSO?) people have this idea that Economics 1 is a difficult course?
Here is a course home page for Olney’s Economics 1 if you want to preview the material (and compare what you learned in your AP course) and try some old exams linked from the home page:
http://eml.berkeley.edu//~olney/fall13/econ1/
I’ve looked at the page and the material does not seem that difficult. I was just to if there was some catch or the class moves at an unexpectedly fast pace?
Economics 1 does cover both introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics in one semester. This is faster than typical high school AP courses (you may find this comparison true for many subjects where there are high school AP courses like calculus AB, statistics, psychology, etc.).
CalSO people always try to scare people out of taking difficult classes. Bottom line: there’s plenty of time to finish whatever major you want to do so they don’t want you rushing into anything and doing poorly. There are GPA requirements, after all. That being said, Econ 1 isn’t all that hard-- you can look at the grade distribution at berkeleytime.com and I think your reasoning is good to think that now’s the right time to take it. A lot of people end up being scared by CalSO and feel like they wasted their first semester because they didn’t challenge themselves enough. Taking Econ early also gives you a good litmus test of how the major is and whether you’d like to pursue it. The drop deadline is also something ridiculous like 5 weeks in. Worse case scenario, you find that the class is really tough and you can drop and find something else. I always load up like 20 units by the end of Phase II and drop classes so that my schedule is of my liking.