<p>thanks menlopark mom! And menlorocket, maybe it’s even more so for aging hippies from the 70s like me. :)</p>
<p>That’s the problem with Berkeley though. I’m not sure where all this hate for transfers is coming from and I frankly don’t have a problem with them, but Berkeley surely needs change (not just admissions, but academic-wise overall) and is unwilling to do it to become better. I wouldn’t call sakky pompous however. But that’s just my quick two cents before I go to my class.</p>
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<p>Menloparkmom, if you don’t like my posts, then don’t read them. Otherwise, perhaps you’d care to point out where exactly in my posts have I been factually incorrect? If I have not been factually incorrect, then what gives you the right to tell other people how they should regard my posts? Who’s really being the pompous ass here? </p>
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<p>I don’t know if that comment was directed at myself, but I utterly fail to see any elitism whatsoever in any posts I’ve made here on this thread. As I said before, I have no problem whatsoever with transfer students in principle, and indeed, I often times think that Berkeley might be better off if the entire undergraduate program consisted of transfer students (and hence, all of them would be able to enjoy a cutrate 2 years of tuition). </p>
<p>But, given that Berkeley does have a mixture of freshman admits and transfer students, it is only fair to then ensure that neither group receives special treatment. Again, if the freshman admits are being weeded, then, frankly, so should the transfer students. {Or, even better, none of them should be weeded.} Otherwise, the transfer students are indeed receiving special treatment, and that represents true elitism. After all, isn’t the notion that one group of students is receiving special privileges denied to another group of students the very definition of elitism? If you disagree, then pray tell, how do you justify the fact that transfer students are allowed to skip over weeders that the freshman admits cannot skip? </p>
<p>Furthermore, it’s not my fault that Berkeley (or any other top flagship public school) does not truly ‘serve the entire public’ as per the notion advanced by certain posters. It’s an indisputable fact that the vast majority of Berkeley applicants - whether freshman class or transfers - will not be admitted, and such admissions are inevitably correlated with wealth. If you don’t like it, don’t blame me, for I’m not the one who architected the system. Take it up with the admissions committee or the administrators, as they’re the ones who are actually making those decisions. I’m simply pointing out the indisputable fact that Berkeley (and the UC system as a whole), right now by its very nature, does not serve the vast majority of the public, and probably never will. Only a tiny fraction of the public is UC-eligible by virtue of the Master Plan, and if that bothers you, then I suggest you direct your ire appropriately.</p>
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I don’t underdstand why people keep equating transfer students to poor students, and then use it as a justification for an arguably broken transfer admission process. The richness/poorness of trasnsfer students is determined by and large by location. Kids in affluent neighborhoods go to nearby CC’s, and there is a CC in every affluent neighborhood. So guess who are bumping off many whose greatest sin was simply borne poor from gaining admissions? Isn’t it ironic that we who have opposite views share the same enemies?
I’m also surprised that you don’t base your accusation of others being pompus, prejudiced, and elitism on facts. For the top private schools, you get full ride if your family has no means to pay. For UCs, you get a pseudo full ride(you have to assume 5.5K of zero-interest loan and 3K of workstudy). Consequently, there is no such thing as beng too poor to afford college. There is, however, such a thing as not being poor enough to afford college. As the saying goes, I have to go to Stanford because I can’t afford Berkeley.
Here are the definitions of the words pompous, prejudice, and elitism from AHD. Judge for yourself who is more pompous, more prejudiced, and more elitism.</p>
<p>Pompous: Characterized by excessive self-esteem or exaggerated dignity
Prejudice: An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts
Elitism: The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.</p>
<p>Sakky, if I understand you correctly, the sole crux of your argument is that transfer students receive special treatment by not being forced to take “weeder” classes.</p>
<p>Yeah, it’s true that there are some difficult classes in the lower division. Some lower division classes are brutal. I heard horror stories about Math 1B. Many transfers do not have to take it because they already took a similar class at their CC. I never had to take it because I received a 5 on my AP Calc BC test and was admitted as a freshman.</p>
<p>So my question to you is: What are you complaining about? Should I have to take it to live up to your standards of "fairness?"Of course not. Nor did you suggest it should be so.</p>
<p>The only other option for fairness is to eliminate weeder classes altogether, as you suggested. Unfortunately, from what I understand, weeder classes are necessary to let the more gifted students rise to the top and succeed in the upper division courses, to differentiate between the invariably bright students of Berkeley.</p>
<p>Weeder classes are unfortunate. Also, they have nothing to do with transfer students. Transfer students do not receive special treatment for not taking weeder classes. They simply avoid the perceived unfairness of weeder classes that many (but not all) four year admits take for their major. Should every injustice against four year admits be blamed on transfer students? </p>
<p>And besides, if it is significantly easier to get into Cal as a transfer, then expect many more people to be doing so over the coming years. Applicants will keep increasing, until only the most qualified can enter.</p>
<p>This is simple scapegoating. Transfer students have nothing to do with weeder classes. The fact that they can avoid taking certain classes is purely incidental and not at all “special treatment.”</p>
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<p>That’s an interesting notion, for if that’s true, then why not weed everybody? After all, shouldn’t we want the gifted transfer students (and the students who passed their AP exams) to also rise to the top? Shouldn’t we also want to differentiate amongst those students as well? Why should such logic apply only to the freshman admits (who didn’t pass their AP’s)? </p>
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<p>You’ve just contradicted yourself, for you’ve freely admitted that they avoid the (possibly perceived) unfairness that many 4-year admits are forced to take. That is indeed special treatment, whether we would like to admit it or not. </p>
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<p>Then that opens up a 3rd possibility. Let the freshman admits take coursework at community colleges or the AP exam so that they too can skip over weeders. Again, the question remains: why should certain people be allowed pathway(s) to avoid weeders if others are not provided with the same pathway(s)?</p>
<p>To extend your analogy, consider a freshman admit who had attended a high school that simply didn’t offer AP Calculus and hence was not provided the opportunity to take the Calculus BC exam. I see nothing wrong with that student, while at Berkeley, studying calculus on his own time to take the AP exam, and if he scores a 5, he too should be allowed to skip Math 1B. I would endorse that. </p>
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<p>First off, I never once proposed that every injustice be blamed on transfer students. Secondly, I never proposed ‘blaming’ the transfer students, and in fact, I stated explicitly that no mileage was to be gained from doing so. The problem is not with the transfer students, for I am well aware that this is not their fault. The problem is with the system; I am therefore proposing systemic reform. </p>
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<p>No, it is not ‘purely incidental’, like I said, it is precisely special treatment, whether we want to acknowledge that fact or not. At the end of the day, transfer students are allowed to skip over weeders that the freshman admits cannot. How is that not special treatment? </p>
<p>To reiterate, I agree with you that the AP exams are also potentially an example of special treatment that also ought to be remedied. But let’s tackle one problem at a time. Just because you can’t solve all problems doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t solve any. </p>
<p>Besides, I utterly fail to see why my proposal is so controversial anyway. Like I said, I’m not asking for the transfers to take the entire weeder courses, merely the final exams - nor am I necessarily asking them to do well on those finals, but merely to pass. If they can’t even do that, then, frankly, they probably shouldn’t have been admitted to those majors. Is this really such an unreasonable request?</p>
<p>This thread only reaffirms my growing belief that UC Berkeley is an unhappy place.</p>
<p>I must have misunderstood what you were proposing.</p>
<p>Referring to your final argument: You think that transfer students should pass an exam for a class that they have not taken? Classes have different conventions. Specifics of what are included on the exams differ for each class. You could take a Berkeley student and give him a physics test from Riverside and it wouldn’t be fair to the Berkeley student because of the fundamental differences in the conventions of classes. I don’t understand how you don’t see how ridiculous that sounds.</p>
<p>You insist that transfer students are given special treatment. No administrator said “let’s take it easy on the transfer students.” It is simply how a schedule of classes functions. There will be difficult classes that some students do not have to take. Transfer students are not “skipping over weeders.” There is no other way for the school to reasonably function.</p>
<p>I understand why other four years are not happy that transfer students never took the GPA hit that they had to. But it’s the only reasonable choice. Personally, I haven’t had too much of a problem with weeder classes or transfers or anything of that sort. I didn’t even know that it was possible to have transferred into Berkeley because I didn’t come to the States until I was a junior.</p>
<p>UC Berkeley becomes an unhappy place to people who can’t handle it.</p>
<p>And don’t act like it’s only here that people are unhappy; did you hear about the asian girl at MIT who killed herself?</p>
<p>there are unhappy people everywhere</p>
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<p>I’m afraid that I find it ridiculous that you don’t see how reasonable this proposal is. </p>
<p>First off, keep in mind that I’m not asking the transfer student to obtain a top grade on this exam. I’m merely asking that he pass. Potentially, the exam could be graded on a P/NP basis. </p>
<p>Secondly, keep in mind that the presumption is that the transfer student is allowed to skip those weeders because he already knows the material of those courses and should therefore be allowed to proceed to later coursework. If that’s really true, then what’s the problem with validating that presumption? After all, the supposed point of weeder courses is to serve as a foundation of knowledge to prepare students for the later sequence of coursework, which means that only those students who can actually demonstrate that they understand that they have that foundational knowledge should be allowed to proceed. {Now, if it turns out that those weeder courses do not actually provide a foundational level of knowledge but are rather forcing students to learn things they don’t really need to know, then that’s a different problem.} </p>
<p>Furthermore, let’s keep in mind that weeder courses are almost always comprised of standardized material. Let’s face it: calculus is calculus, OChem is OChem, general physics is general physics. Generally speaking, the material should be the same regardless of where you took the coursework, as long as you learned it well. </p>
<p>I would therefore submit it is entirely reasonable for somebody who claims that he took enough calculus coursework in a community college to be allowed to skip the Berkeley calculus weeders to actually prove that he should be allowed to skip those weeders by demonstrating his knowledge. Why not? If you truly do know the material, then you have nothing to fear, right? I would argue that it is ridiculous to argue that they couldn’t or shouldn’t do so. </p>
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<p>But that’s not the point. The transfer student is coming to Berkeley, so he should be willing to adhere to the same rules that Berkeley students are forced to undergo. </p>
<p>I agree that different classes have different conventions, but at the end of the day, the material is the same, or ought to be. {If they are substantially different, then that speaks to another reason as to why transfer student should not be allowed to skip weeders.} </p>
<p>Besides, as I said, if you truly did learn the material well at the community college, then you should have little difficult in adjusting to the new conventions. The exams would not be a surprise - I would provide ample time for the transfer students to complete them. They could have full access to the Black Lightning lecture notes, or past sample exams. And, again, I’m not asking them to do well, but merely to pass. If they can’t even pass, then that only confirms the suspicion that they don’t deserve the special treatment that they are receiving. While I might believe that the conventions might differ enough to prevent one from obtaining an A, it is hard to believe that they differ to the degree that you won’t even be able to pass. {And if that truly were the case, then that indicates that those weeder exams are so sufficiently different from their corresponding community college coursework that transfer students should not be allowed to skip them.} </p>
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<p>I believe the above suggestion is quite reasonable, and certainly far more equitable than the current system.</p>
<p>Or, as I said, let’s take my other suggestion and allow the freshman admits to skip over weeders by taking courses at cc’s or through AP exams. Or, even better, why not abolish weeders completely? </p>
<p>But at the end of the day, what’s fair is fair. Weeders should not be inflicted upon certain students and not others. That is indeed special treatment, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not. After all, to continue the train of thought that you proposed earlier, if weeders are truly necessary as a differentiating point to maintain the quality of the student body, then why not subject every student to the weeders?</p>
<p>'I’m afraid that I find it ridiculous that you don’t see how reasonable this proposal is. "</p>
<p>I rest my case.</p>
<p>I’m trying to propose serious solutions to a real problem. You may choose to disagree with those solutions, but at least I’m trying. What exactly have you contributed to this thread, menloparkmom? </p>
<p>I rest my case.</p>
<p>Now I see why you were called pompous and arrogant, Sakky.</p>
<p>Maybe twelve thousand CC posts over the past six years have too addled your mind, and now you can’t see a laughably bad idea for what it is.</p>
<p>So laughably bad that your acute intellect is incapable of coming up with a good counterargument? Why does that always happen?</p>
<p>By now I thought it would be obvious, indiscreetmath, as evidenced by my earlier post. Indeed, for rational people, it would be obvious that requiring people to pass tests that examine specific course materials without having taken the class from which the test is derived is unreasonable.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, both you and Sakky are either immune to logical thought or incapable of admitting you’re wrong.</p>
<p>Good day, sirs. Enjoy your ePower.</p>
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<p>You have offered no reasonable point of contention that sakky can’t refute. In addition, you have no responses to sakky’s remarks other than reiterating another post and commenting on his post count. So, why exactly is it a laughably bad idea?</p>
<p>It’s not a bad idea-- if a transfer student knows the material, then what is the harm in taking and passing an exam on the material that s/he has supposedly learned? The administration of such exam would address and aid in solving two issues-- the contention of fairness and the abysmal performance of some transfer students in the sciences. The former has already been covered extensively in this thread but the latter was only briefly mentioned.</p>
<p>I’ve taken quite a few classes in the biological sciences as well as the archetypal biology pre-reqs and I’ve noticed that the students straddling the bottom half of the curve are mostly transfer students. I cannot speak for the humanities or social sciences, but I know my observation is resounded by students in other branches of the sciences, such as chemistry, physics, etc. The problem seems to be that these low-performing transfer students simply don’t have solid enough backgrounds to handle the work expected of them. For example, in my cell biology lab class, some transfer students were so befuddled by the principles of PCR such that their data presentations were downright terrible with all sorts of nonsense data interpretation. Mind you, PCR is one of those basic experimental techniques that you learn in Bio 1A/1AL and MCB 102. </p>
<p>In any case, these students receive low marks in their classes and effectively have their chances of getting into grad school or professional schools crushed. So this exam that sakky proposed can gauge the level of competency of transfer applicants who are interested in the sciences. And what is to be done with the scores? Obviously, the school can use it directly for admissions purposes. But the school can also release it to the applicants to let them judge for themselves if they should really pursue a path that they are not prepared for.</p>
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<p>These specific course materials are not just taught at Berkeley, they should be taught in all transferable classes according to Assist.org. I mean, unless you learned different laws for thermodynamics, which I highly highly doubt. Try harder, please.</p>
<p>I’ll make this very simple for you, tastybeef:</p>
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<li>A course at Berkeley is likely more rigorous than a course elsewhere. Rigor can be defined in one or more of many ways – breadth, depth, etc.</li>
<li>A more rigorous course will likely have a more rigorous test.</li>
<li>One who has not taken the rigorous course will not be exposed to the information particular to a course.*</li>
<li>It is unreasonable to expect one who has not taken an identically rigorous course to perform even adequately on an equally rigorous test because the idiosyncracies of a course have not been covered in the other class.**</li>
<li>If the one who has not taken the rigorous course does indeed perform well on the test, then either the course is easier than Berkeley’s standards would predicate or the test is easier than what Berkeley’s standards would predicate.</li>
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<p>*In relation to your straw man remark about thermodynamics: I’m not referring to the core concepts of the material. I’m not saying that the laws of thermodynamics change between courses. I’m saying that there are differences in methods and coverage of topics. Maybe one course did not cover the applications of thermodynamics in a particular area.</p>
<p>**If I took a class by one professor, and had learned all the material and the standards for the test questions for that material, then took the final from another, completely unaffiliated professor and had to conform to whatever particular topics they had covered in that class, material to which I had not been exposed, I would feel robbed, and you would too.</p>
<p>Did you catch all that, tastybeef? I know that you would like to intentionally misunderstand my comments, as you did at the end of your recent post. I’d like not to repeat myself, and I won’t have to, provided you keep up. Thanks.</p>
<p>Berkeley should be ranked top 3 in the new US News Report Rankings.</p>
<p>They base it SOOOO heavily on foundation money. And all the foundations of private schools tanked recently.</p>
<p>For US News Rankings:</p>
<p>1 million in foundation income is 100x more important than 1 million in federal funding money according to US news. So this means all the private schools should drop HEAVILY this next round of rankings, or else US news is not academically honest.</p>
<p>And that is not very berkelesque of them to be academically dishonest!</p>
<p>I don’t understand your argument. Of course it’s unreasonable to expect that a Berkeley course won’t be significantly harder than a community college course. So of course it’s unreasonable to expect that the average person in that community college course will do even passably on a Berkeley test. </p>
<p>So what? The goal isn’t to admit the average community college student. The good, motivated students, who learned the material beyond the level that was absolutely required for the class, will be able to do well. And those are the students that Berkeley should aim to admit, no?</p>
<p>And I’m not sure why you would feel robbed in the situation you described. If your knowledge of thermodynamics is limited to memorizing the applications which were explicitly told to you in lecture, then maybe you don’t really know the subject?</p>