<p>These stats are from the College of Letters and Science (L&S), which serves the vast majority of Cal students. MCB, Poli Sci, and econ (three popular majors for pre-med, pre-law, and pre-bus, respectively) are all in L&S. You can interpret them however you'd like.</p>
<p>Also, the pace of quarter is faster than semester. Some of my friends at schools on quarter have told me that it just seems like you've just started the course when suddenly it's midterm season again. Midterms start around the third week, because quarter is 10 weeks + 1 week of finals.</p>
<p>For the semester system, the grade on one exam is not as consequential? I thought for every college your grade is highly dependent on the midterm, the final, a paper maybe? and a few other misc. stuff.</p>
<p>Yeah, but chance is that you would have more papers & midterms for the semester system, which will then be averaged. You can get slacked off for a while and can still make the come back.</p>
<p>These stats are from the College of Letters and Science (L&S), which serves the vast majority of Cal students. MCB, Poli Sci, and econ (three popular majors for pre-med, pre-law, and pre-bus, respectively) are all in L&S. You can interpret them however you'd like.
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<p>The problem with this is that ALL L&S students are judged using the same GPA cutoffs. Yet the fact is, some L&S majors are graded far harder than others. Physics and Mathematics, for example, are graded very harshly. Certain other majors, which shall remain unnamed, are not. Yet the Physics and Math students are forced to present the same sort of GPA as everybody else in L&S in order to attain Dean's List or these honors distinctions.</p>
<p>What Berkeley should do is have individualized GPA cutoffs for each particular major. For example, the Physics students need such-and-such GPA in order to get on the Dean's list, whereas students of some cheesepuff major will need a much higher one. Or even better, these GPA cutoffs should be individualized for each particular student, depending on what courses they took. For example, to get onto the Dean's list you have to present a GPA that is in the top 4% for the specific selection of courses that you took. So there would be no more cherry-picking of easy courses by people who are close to the cutoff just to push them over the top. With my proposal, if you take easy courses, then the GPA you have to obtain will increase. In other words, the more grade-inflated your courses, the higher the GPA you will have to attain.</p>
<p>What Berkeley should do is have individualized GPA cutoffs for each particular major. For example, the Physics students need such-and-such GPA in order to get on the Dean's list, whereas students of some cheesepuff major will need a much higher one. Or even better, these GPA cutoffs should be individualized for each particular student, depending on what courses they took. For example, to get onto the Dean's list you have to present a GPA that is in the top 4% for the specific selection of courses that you took. So there would be no more cherry-picking of easy courses by people who are close to the cutoff just to push them over the top. With my proposal, if you take easy courses, then the GPA you have to obtain will increase. In other words, the more grade-inflated your courses, the higher the GPA you will have to attain.
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<p>hey sakky you seem to know a lot about cal. what do think about going there for premed. do you think that ppl at ucla are more likely to get a higher gpa than at cal? i know these are questions that don't have answers... but what's ur opinion? and the ls courses you didn't wanna name... chemistry isn't one of them right?</p>
<p>dyip10 - I'm not sure what you're asking, but for whatever it's worth, Cal is on spring break right now, but I've spent most of it studying for a midterm I have on Wednesday, and researching for two papers, one due on Thursday and the other on the second Monday after break.</p>
<p>More testing, more often means less stuff can be covered on each midterm which makes it easier to study for IMO. I looked over some friends of mine who go to UCLA and Stanford and their tests seem a lot "easier" than mine in that you have to know less stuff overall. </p>
<p>And having a semester system in no way helps you IMO. Some professors only have one midterm and one final with problem sets 10% of the grade despite a semester system. This is lazy teaching in my opinion because you don't have any idea of how well you're doing (problem sets can often be unrepresentative of the midterm and finals themselves). Professors often cram a bunch of stuff not on the problem sets on the midterm also which is unfair since you don't get to practice problems and see how you're doing. Yeah, everyone takes the same test, but for people who are tackling on several things at once and need to optimize their time, it can be very difficult.</p>
<p>If you have a crap teacher like this and have to drop your class you waste a lot more time and money than on a quarter system where you can retake the class later or know where you are sooner. </p>
<p>I would have to say the quarter system is far superior.</p>
<p>I personally begin to feel "burned out" right around Week 8 or Week 9; if I were in a school on the quarter system, I wouldn't mind so much because I'd have only a couple weeks left until term ends. That's one of the biggest advantages that the quarter system would have for someone like me. I am thankful, though, for the apparent "slowness" of the semester system because I'm your typical procrastinator. </p>
<p>It's all just a matter of preference, really. Some people feel like quarters are too fast while others feel like semesters are too slow.</p>
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More testing, more often means less stuff can be covered on each midterm which makes it easier to study for IMO. I looked over some friends of mine who go to UCLA and Stanford and their tests seem a lot "easier" than mine in that you have to know less stuff overall.
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<p>I doubt that this makes much of a difference. I think this mostly has to do with the culture of the school itself rather than any inherent trait of the quarter vs. semester system. For example, Caltech is on the quarter system. But that doesn't mean that they have "easier" exams. Far from it, actually. In fact, I would say that the Caltech quarterly exams require you to know more than the Berkeley semesterly exams do in order to pass. </p>
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And having a semester system in no way helps you IMO. Some professors only have one midterm and one final with problem sets 10% of the grade despite a semester system. This is lazy teaching in my opinion because you don't have any idea of how well you're doing (problem sets can often be unrepresentative of the midterm and finals themselves). Professors often cram a bunch of stuff not on the problem sets on the midterm also which is unfair since you don't get to practice problems and see how you're doing. Yeah, everyone takes the same test, but for people who are tackling on several things at once and need to optimize their time, it can be very difficult.</p>
<p>If you have a crap teacher like this and have to drop your class you waste a lot more time and money than on a quarter system where you can retake the class later or know where you are sooner. </p>
<p>I would have to say the quarter system is far superior.
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<p>I don't see that the semester system or the quarter system is itself inherently good or bad. Many, probably most, of the elite LAC's like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Wellesley are on the semester system, yet are renowned for good teaching and a strong undergraduate experience. The entire Ivy League sans Dartmouth are on the semester system, yet that doesn't seem to have hurt them. So is MIT. I highly highly doubt that a lot of students at MIT think that classes are too slow. </p>
<p>I think it's really about about how well a school runs its semester or quarterly system, rather than anything inherent about the quarterly/semesterly system itself.</p>
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what do think about going there for premed. do you think that ppl at ucla are more likely to get a higher gpa than at cal? i know these are questions that don't have answers... but what's ur opinion? and the ls courses you didn't wanna name... chemistry isn't one of them right?
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<p>I think it's probably about the same. I don't see any serious GPA advantage to be gained by going to UCLA over Berkeley. </p>
<p>Now, choosing a low-level CalState over Berkeley may be a different story, just like choosing Berkeley over MIT or Caltech is a different story. But I doubt that too many people are really willing to choose to go to a low-level CalState if they have the chance to go to Berkeley. </p>
<p>And, no, chemistry is not one of the cheesepuff L&S majors that I was referring to.</p>
<p>And besides, this has nothing to do with me anyway. I wasn't talking about myself. I am saying that there is a general problem in Berkeley (and other schools) that certain majors are more difficult than others. They tend to assign more work and tend to be graded harder. That is the flaw of GPA cutoffs that do not take into account the varying difficulty levels of various majors.</p>