<p>Well, what can I say - I think it’s a case of stupid organizations doing stupid things. For example, one could just as easily ask why Princeton recently actually (foolishly) curbed its own grade inflation, only to have none of its competing schools such as HYS follow suit. Princeton just gravely damaged itself. </p>
<p>Look, the fact is, organizations do stupid things all the time. You can’t always expect organizations to behave in a manner that may be perfectly logical to an outsider. Berkeley probably feels (erroneously) that it is actually helping its students by implementing tough grading policies that the outside world will respect. The problem is that the outside world doesn’t respect tough grading policies, as numerous empirical studies have found. When you compare one candidate with a 3.5 and another with a 3.2 - everything else being equal - it is highly tempting to simply choose the guy with the 3.5 </p>
<p>One could also easily ask the question of why don’t graduate adcoms simply ‘correct’ for the differing admission policies of the various undergrad colleges? After all, Berkeley is not a small, unknown school. Berkeley is large and famous. Hence, you would think that grad school adcoms would know that Berkeley students are graded harder than students of other schools, and compensate accordingly. That would be the behavior to expect if organizations behaved rationally. Yet the fact is not even Berkeley’s own grad school adcoms seem to know, or care. For example, a Berkeley undergrad who wants to be admitted to Berkeley’s own law school needs the same GPA, and perhaps higher, compared to applicants from other programs. To that, I would point to a simple asymmetry of incentives that faces all adcoms. All adcoms are judged by the performance of the students they actually admit, not on the performance of the students they didn’t admit, but should have. So if the Berkeley Law School adcom erroneously rejects a bunch of Berkeley undergrads who would have turned out to be excellent law students, nobody will ever know.</p>
<p>Calkidd and Sakky have it right. On average, Stanford and Harvard students are way more qualified than Berkeley students. However, if you look at a major like EECS at Berkeley, your average Harvard student would get creamed in the most severest way possible, even if he was good at math and science in high school. Brilliant students exist at all the schools. It’s pretty clear Berkeley has some majors that are very hard. So does Stanford – engineering there ain’t a joke, but as Sakky says, it seems Berkeley’s is an order of magnitude harsher. Because the average Stanford student is more qualified than a Berkeley engineer <em>academically</em>? Not really. On this count, it seems Stanford just doesn’t see it necessary to make it harder to get good grades, and frankly I agree with that philosophy – it’s HARD to get an A in tough engineering classes there, but I don’t think splitting hairs and making it harder is better.</p>
<p>EDIT: A little other thing. I have found that unfortunately, the hardest majors at Cal often have both some of the hardest material AND hardest grading! Cal is broken into people A) Not academically qualified enough to get into HYPS and B) More than academically qualified, but lacking in other personal factors. The (B) variety will often end up in these hard majors, and will bash heads! One of the sad things. How glad I am that I have avoided this.</p>
<p>For the record, I never said, nor did I ever mean to imply, that going to Stanford or Harvard will “set you for life” or “guarantee” you a spot anywhere.</p>
<p>What I have said is that on a probablistic standpoint, certain paths are easier than others, and the fact is, when it comes to grad school admissions, grade inflation works. It shouldn’t work, but it does work. Grad school adcoms should adjust for the differing grading practices of different schools. But the empirical evidence strongly indicates that this is not so. Hence, ceteris paribus, it is to your strategic advantage to attend the school that has the most inflated grading. Sad but true.</p>
<p>I have heard it is ridiculously hard to ahev a good GPA at Berkeley. With that being said, it was mentioned that Phd programs adjust for GPA depending on the school you went to, but what about MBA, Law and Med schools? Do they care anything about where you went or solely on GPA?</p>
<p>sakky, I still find it hard to believe that the only reason why they don’t do it is because they don’t realize it’s damaging to their students. What I mean is that, there must be some advantage to having super grade deflation. Your last statement, though probably true, is horribly depressing. Especially for incoming freshmen…</p>
<p>Surely, there must be SOME good that will come out of all this.</p>
<p>mathboy-i believe i am a type B student. I am screwed. lol. Though I think a lot of schools have this problem, even HYPS I would think–there is a divide between the students who are academically capable and those who aren’t…</p>
You oversimplify the situation by assuming that the difficulty of the engineering curriculum implies that CoE students can thrive in other departments or universities. While some engineering students are well-rounded, you’d be surprised to see the number of engineers, raised in English-speaking countries, who can crunch numbers like crazy but can’t manage to write a coherent paragraph. I know for a fact that Stanford and Harvard’s undergraduate requirements include more humanities courses than Berkeley’s, and this would be a disadvantage to them.</p>
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No top-tier graduate or professional program adjusts for Berkeley’s grade deflation. Therefore, it is to your advantage to get the highest grades possible, no matter how you do it. Attend a grade-inflation university; sign up for an easy major; take easy classes; use Pick-A-Prof and CampusBuddy to find the instructors who award the most A’s; et cetera. If your ultimate goal is grad/prof school, you might as well learn nothing as an undergrad and get the 4.0, knowing that your postgraduate education is far more important, than challenge yourself at a rigorous institution and mess up your grades, limiting your future possibilities. Many people believe that the latter would never happen to them, but it does–and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done except pity them.</p>
<p>Sure, there is an advantage to those relatively few Berkeley students who can nevertheless get top grades anyway, as it allows them to stand out. The problem is that that advantage is clearly dwarfed by all of the problems incurred by all of the students who don’t get immaculate grades. </p>
<p>As I’ve always said, Berkeley is an excellent school for those students who do well. But what about all those students who don’t do well? What happens to them? It could be argued that perhaps those students should simply have not been admitted in the first place, and I have in fact advocated that argument myself for those students who earn GPA’s of less than 2.5, as those students would clearly have been better off at some other school. But given that Berkeley won’t change its admissions policies, the next best thing to do is reform its grading policies.</p>
<p>WTH?! i know if i attend berkeley it is going to be hard… but you guys make it sound impossible…
i have a 3.6, im not the smartest student around, I am a bit lazy, and I would like to do Economics. I got accepted into Berkeley for the Spring term '10 as a transfer student…</p>
<p>do i even have a shot at getting a 3.2 ish at Berkeley? (please answer, im getting worried)
my gosh, im losing hope so quickly lol </p>
<p>but overall, i am getting the feeling that Berkeley grades much harder than other colleges in general… arent grades generally determined by the teacher? so each teacher doesnt give very generous curves and you have to work harder on your own?</p>
<p>I don’t think I’m oversimplifying the situation at all, actually. When I say academically qualified, I mean to succeed in the given major. College, let’s face it, ain’t about getting A’s in breadth requirements. Hell, I take my breadth requirements Pass-Fail, even though aside from mathematics, English/literature classes were probably the ones I was best at. Once I got to college, I really started focusing on my major, and I meant that COE students generally are well-equipped to succeed at their school. </p>
<p>OK sure, the ones that don’t really speak English may have a bit of an issue – but other schools probably have accommodations for those like this. But in all seriousness, amusingly enough, a lot of engineers at Berkeley will actually be more well spoken than some of the humanities majors who’re doing their majors because they’re not very motivated. Engineering friends of mine and I have sat in upper division literature classes and gotten A’s on essays with no effort while gaping at how deficient some of the students there were.</p>
<p>Now granted, these weren’t the HARDCORE literature majors, but it’s just an example of the disparity. I actually think to a somewhat lesser extent, the same kind of disparity exists in the math department.</p>
<p>Even if I did, the benefits would be so marginal as to be basically negligible. After all, the real competition for grad school spots is not the intra-Berkeley competition, but rather the competition against students from other schools, particularly those (like a certain one in Palo Alto) that are infamous for relaxed grading standards. </p>
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<p>To be clear, I don’t think the problem is with the high end of the grading scale. A top GPA is hard to get anywhere, even in Palo Alto. </p>
<p>The issue is with the lower end of the scale. Those other schools truncate their grading schemes such that it is practically impossible to get a truly terrible GPA. Even the students among the bottom of their class will have a GPA that, while middling, will still allow them to pass their classes and graduate. On the other hand, some Berkeley students will indeed end up with truly terrible GPA’s. For example, I knew one guy whose GPA was literally 0.5. That is, his grades were half D’s, half F’s. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I think the most salient issue is not so much with overall grade inflation between particular schools, but the relative grade inflation of certain majors of those schools. For example, it is a well-established fact that has been discussed here on this thread that engineering and the natural science majors are simply graded harder than are the humanities and social science majors, for reasons that I have never found to be logical. Why should certain students in certain majors be able to get higher grades for less work than do students in other majors? I could understand perhaps if this might happen in certain years due to simple randomness. But the problem is systemic. For example, Berkeley students may find Chemical Engineering to be too hard and switch to majoring in American Studies. But you never hear of an American Studies student complaining that the major is too hard and switching over to Chemical Engineering. </p>
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<p>In fairness to Berkeley, I think it should also be said that I doubt that Berkeley’s grading is harder than that of the bulk of other schools. If we could somehow measure the grading standards of all 2700 colleges in the United States, weighted by student population, I suspect that Berkeley would fall somewhere in the middle. In fact, the average Berkeley GPA is about a 3.25, which is roughly around the national average. </p>
<p>But I don’t think that’s the right comparison to draw. After all, Berkeley isn’t just an average school. Berkeley is supposed to be one of the very best schools, and the students are supposed to be among the best in the country. Hence, I think it is entirely proper to compare Berkeley against the Ivies, Stanford, and other top private schools such as Duke and Northwestern. To that, I would say that Berkeley’s grading scheme is one of the harder ones, and certainly a “truncated-ly” harder one. That is, somebody who flunked out of Berkeley could have probably passed, if barely, if he had gone to one of those other schools. </p>
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<p>I think you hit upon the heart of the issue. While grading is generally determined by prof, profs at Berkeley have little hesitation to hand out bad grades, compared to profs at those other schools. That may be due to social factors and tipping points: if you’re the only prof at Stanford who actually grades hard, you will clearly stick out from the rest of the faculty, but if you’re a tough grader at Berkeley, you will not be conspicuous because the Berkeley faculty has many tough graders. </p>
<p>However, certain courses at Berkeley institute tough grading as a result of direct departmental policy, regardless of what the individual prof may want to do. For example, the Berkeley EECS department specifically states that average course grading is not to exceed 2.7-2.9. The outcome of this policy is, of course, to gravely damage the prospects of the bulk of those students when they compete for grad school spots and jobs against EE/CS students from Stanford. </p>
<p>A few faculty members ignore those guidelines and award inflated grades anyway. Thanks to new technology like Pick-A-Prof, we now know exactly who they are. But you’re right: most Berkeley engineering professors do grade harshly and they’re proud of it, too. They’re generally also the ones who spew out garbage like “don’t worry–grad schools will adjust your GPAs accordingly” or “one C grade won’t hurt you.”</p>
<p>I did try to convey some of your sentiments (which reflect my own) in the CoE graduation survey I had to fill out. Whether they’ll give a **** is a whole different story, though.</p>
<p>I actually don’t think there is a significant difference between the non-foreign-language breadth requirements for engineering students at Berkeley vs. those at Stanford or Harvard, when corrected for differences in the academic calendar. Berkeley requires 6 breadth semester courses, whereas Stanford requires 10 trimester courses, which is basically the same after correcting for the differences in semesters and trimesters. </p>
<p>Harvard, I agree, does require more courses, or will starting with the revamped Core Curriculum. But the requirements are almost certainly easier than the breadth requirements of the Berkeley CoE, which mandate that 2 of the 6 requirements actually be upper-division courses. </p>
<p>Where I would agree is that Stanford and Harvard have extensive foreign language requirements that the Berkeley CoE does not have. However, if somebody is not a native English speaker, then by definition, he speaks another language fluently, in which case he would have been able to easily fill those language requirements by simply taking courses or taking the appropriate departmental waiver placement tests in his home language. </p>
<p>Heck, I remember Berkeley students who were fluent in their home language but sneakily decided to take the intro courses in that language anyway, just to get a string of easy A’s (and screwing over all the students in those courses who were actually trying to learn the language). They didn’t learn anything new, but hey, they got their A’s and that’s all that mattered to them. I believe Berkeley tried to clamp down on this game by assessing whether students trying to take those intro courses weren’t already fluent in the language and just trying to cynically pad their GPA’s. However, a simpler way to solve this problem would have been to simply grade all of those basic language courses on a P/NP basis, thereby removing the incentive for people to camp out and hunt for easy A’s.</p>
<p>Well, this thread got bumped from so long ago, but I’d like to give my input anyway.</p>
<p>My best friend, who was always regarded as the “genius” of our school, now attends Stanford as an Materials engineering major. His view on the academics are that the material tends to be very difficult, but overall it is not very difficult to do well. He said he spent a large portion of time partying and still ended up with around a 3.5 this year. Of course, he had to put in a lot of hard work, but not nearly as much as some of my friends who are engineering at Cal. </p>
<p>My friend also said that he is confident that anyone who got into Stanford through the actual admissions process (they didn’t buy themselves in, or athletics or something) could definitely get a 3.8+ as long as they put a lot of effort (in almost any major, as well). From what I hear, this is not the case for UC Berkeley. </p>
<p>I personally can’t say, as I haven’t attended either school, just info I gathered from friends.</p>
<p>I have a hard time believing Stanford engineering is doable for most of its admits. I know very smart people who got into top schools incl. MIT and Berk who believe EE is quite hard there, at least to get A’s.</p>
<p>I didn’t find Berkeley engineering to always be insanely crazy either (some of it is).</p>
<p>Cornell is a terrible place to go to “escape” Berkeley grading, and it’s in a location I think little of (though there are really smart people there, and it is a really good school).</p>
<p>Calkidd and sakky basically said all there was to be said.</p>