<p>Well, the curve can hurt or help you depending on who else is in your section. The competition gets especially tough at the top because there are so few A’s given out (meaning, if you have a few pretty smart people in your section… good luck). It probably won’t affect the Bs and Cs that much though.</p>
<p>Econ 1 is an introduction, they teach everything over again plus a bunch of other stuff. But, a lot of people did take econ in high school</p>
<p>The curve usually helps you more than it hurts you in pretty much every econ class I’ve taken. I don’t remember specifics from Econ 1 (Olney) but midterm averages were in the high 60’s/low 70’s which is usually curved to a B/B- in lower division weeders, meaning the curve is a good 10% or so.</p>
<p>That being said, even though the curve will basically always help raise your percentage in absolute terms, relatively if everyone else is smart in your section/gsi it will still be tough to get a good grade. Though if I remember correctly, we were curved by GSI, not by Section so since every GSI taught like 3 sections, you were curved relative to around 90 people. Delong gives about 11% A’s and above (<a href=“https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/course/330[/url]”>https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/course/330</a>) so you have to be about the top 10 students per GSI. 90 students is enough to give enough variation for you to distinguish yourself if you really deserve that grade, especially since a good portion of the class aren’t econ/ugba majors.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the tips and advises everyone! Keep em coming if you got any =]!</p>
<p>@WhalePicnic,</p>
<p>Wait so does it mean that Prof. DeLong will most likely have a curve for every exam, then another curve will be given by our section GSI? Or Does the section GSI fix DeLong’s curve depending on their sections? Or am I being confused here and all curves are depended on our section GSI? Sorry about the confusion :(!</p>