So let’s say I want to major in CS in Letters and Science. There are x classes/credits I HAVE to take in order to major in CS, and there are y credits that I (like all other students regardless of major) have to earn to graduate. Does y far outweigh x? I’m thinking about taking many of the simpler AP exams in my senior year to amass a lot of credits, so will all of these credits be efficiently transferred into the gen education requirement at UCB? I plan on taking most prereq classes because those are the ones that set me up for the hard late-college classes.THANKS.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/csugrad/ indicates that L&S CS requires 28 units of lower division courses and 27 units of upper division courses, for a total of 55 units. AP calculus BC with a 5 can exempt you from 8 units of math, reducing it to 47 units.
http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/requirement/summary.html lists L&S requirements. Most students will need to take reading and composition (8 units, some or all of which can be satisfied with AP English with high enough scores). The 7-course breadth requirement cannot be fulfilled with AP credit, although one of them can be satisfied by a course required for the L&S CS major, leaving 6 of them for about 24 units (most courses are 4 units, although there are some 2 or 3 unit courses). If you do not have the foreign language requirement already satisfied, then it may take up to 10 more units of foreign language courses to satisfy it. So the total could be as low as 24 units (or even less if you take 2 or 3 unit breadth courses) to as high as 42 units.
Even if you need the maximum number of units (55 + 42 = 97), you will still have 23 units of free electives to reach 120 units needed for graduation.