<p>Are you serious? You need a 3.96+ to even be nominated for the university medal.</p>
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In fact, with the long history of student activism at Cal, I'm surprised that students haven't made any protests about the grade deflation, especially in the math, science, and engineering departments.
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<p>Engineering students are probably too busy trying to get decent grades</p>
<p>There also are worthier causes to protest about than college grades (trees and stadium landscaping notwiithstanding...)</p>
<p>calculating your gpa isn't as easy as converting your grades to points and dividing that by the number of classes.
first convert your grades to points (A = 4.0, A- = 3.7, etc).
Then, multiply that point by the number of units offered for that class.
Add them all up, and divide by the total number of units.
Pass/Not Pass units do not count.
That's why getting an A in a 2 unit class won't do much to improve your gpa, but getting a C in a 5 unit class will hit a big dip.</p>
<p>This is an example of why i recommended my kids turn down Cal and attend a different university for their pre-med studies. They would of preferred Cal, but getting into med school requires a game plan and risking a 40 year career on the grading policies of an undergraduate institution is a bad bet. For anything but pre-med however, I would go with Cal.</p>
<p>This thread is somewhat old!! Anyway, my own view is that one should generally choose a mixture between the school with the best “raw” resources for one’s goals, along with the fewest factors hindering enjoyment of these. This is also what some have told me about graduate schools – some schools have entirely onerous requirements to finish the program, for instance. While in theory Berkeley is one of the world’s greatest research powerhouses, things like overcrowding, along with grading policies, can be unfavorable in some departments. While there are certainly some extremely harsh math professors, I find that there are plenty who are reasonable, and perhaps in a major like CS, departmental regulations make it difficult to be reasonable.</p>
<p>grad schools don’t compensate that much just because you’re applying from Berkeley iirc. A below par gpa compared to a stanford’s high-ish gpa is not going to get you accepted.</p>
<p>@ Bigtime: I think Cal is a great school for pre-meds and prepares students very well for med school. Pre-med classes here are tough, but not nearly as “cut-throat” as people make them out to be. If you work hard (and possibly stray from the typical MCB track) it is realistic to end up with a 3.8+ GPA. Soo I think it’s too bad that your kids did not choose Cal for their pre-med studies…</p>
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<p>I understand your statement is somewhat neutral Batman, and you phrase it as “a below par GPA…is not going to get you accepted” – I’m just commenting, and what you said is in a sense right.</p>
<p>But for what it’s worth, the quoted statement may be more relevant to professional schools (like medical and law schools) which some also refer to as graduate schools. But strictly speaking many PhD programs don’t care quite as much about GPA, most especially ones that are more practical or experimental disciplines. I know that in engineering, a good GPA can help, but research experience helps a lot more. In the math department, I believe it’s possible to avoid ridiculous professors and take courses with ones who are reasonable. From the standpoint of engineering or such, I think Stanford is very challenging – if you’re at the low end of the GPA scale where the differences in grading policies start mattering for something like engineering grad school, you may not be a strong applicant anyway, given GPA is merely one factor.</p>
<p>Now I’ll fully endorse the idea that it’s hard to be a premed at Berkeley, and it may even be a disadvantage. But I’m going to say that if you really are shaping to be a strong applicant to grad schools, likely a Berkeley education will help tremendously and shouldn’t be hurtful enough that comparing to other schools is just nitpicking. </p>
<p>Also, my friend in EECS spoke to his advisor, and according to him the comparable difficulty of maintaining strong records in EECS here is very much taken into account by the EECS department. If there are high acceptance percentages from some schools, I will guess that there were many other factors coming into play. </p>
<p>Now, a poster like Sakky has often made the point that for the students who’re struggling to stay afloat at all, Berkeley is probably one of the worst places. After all, they’re probably neither making it into great graduate schools nor getting jobs because of their educational background, and in the end are miserable for no reason. I don’t know any such individuals, but allegedly they exist. But for even anyone from average and up, I don’t think it is at all clear that attending Berkeley will be detrimental. It may have a relatively neutral effect on most, and a positive effect on some of the better off students, and a negative effect on some of the more unfortunately off students. I will not call them “worse” as this would be unduly judgemental.</p>