<p>all the prereqs are just ******* in general.</p>
<p>@ AznN3rd: That’s how it always works out for me too. I have found it’s best to just avoid easy classes completely haha.</p>
<p>lol, i have A-'s in 3al & 1al and A’s in all my lecture courses. labs blow.</p>
<p>oh yeah, and i also got an A- in chem 1b cuz i got a 10/30 on a lab report that was worth 10% of our grade. ROFL. ****ing christ.</p>
<p>*** yea! solid A in 3BL!</p>
<p>I got an A-…but I’m happy for you Mech. I got an A in 3AL, so it evens out?</p>
<p>guess so :)</p>
<p>@Leftist: “Also, if you are premed, you can’t skip Biology 1B unless you want to be a risk-taker.”
Could you expand on this a little? Is it because a lot of upper division courses build on Bio 1B, because many med schools require it, or because of something else? I’m thinking of skipping it right now, so some explanation would be appreciated! On the other hand, would you recommend skipping Bio 1A?</p>
<p>^ You need Bio 1B b/c med schools require 1 year of general bio. However it will most likely not help you for upper divs (maybe unless you’re IB Track 1). You should under no circumstances skip Bio 1A though. You need to have a strong foundation of Bio 1A material to do well in upper div MCB classes.</p>
<p>“pickaprof says 89% get A’s in 3AL and 83% get A’s in 3BL”</p>
<p>This is absolutely ridiculous. I had heard that there might be some rigorous academic standards at UC Berkeley but I guess I was mistaken if they offer classes in which 89% of the students get an A. No more than 20% of the class should get an A in a legitimate college level course.</p>
<p>It’s not the whole course, it’s only the 2-unit lab component… Look up the distributions of 3A/3B before you say anything. </p>
<p>What school do you go to anyway?</p>
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<p>[Grade</a> inflation](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DGrade”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) has meant that it is common in many universities for more than 20% of large classes graded on a curve to get an A. Brown and Stanford, with average GPAs greater than 3.5, presumably give more A grades than anything else.</p>
<p>Universities do have incentive to inflate grades for various reasons, but the end result is that the entire grading scale is compressed at the top end, making it more difficult to distinguish between good, great, and extraordinarily great students by their grades.</p>
<p>However, as noted by another poster, the courses in question are 2-unit labs whose grading is not necessarily reflective of the overall grading practice at Berkeley.</p>
<p>@flutterfly_28</p>
<p>I am an alumnus of the University of Maryland College Park and at least in the Physics Department lab courses were very tough. I had one upper division 3 credit Physics lab that started out with 18 students. By the end of the semester there were five of us left. Along with two other students I received a B and the other two managed to get Cs. The experiments, which largely involved reproducing the key experiments in Quantum Physics, were very hard to perform and the theory behind them was not easy to understand. The lab was taught by a professor who had a reputation of being very hard but fair. I suppose he has given out an A or two but only to students whose work was truly extraordinary. My performance was good but by no means extraordinary so I was happy with my B.</p>
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<p>You could ‘sequester’ Bio1B - or any other premed class for that matter - in your final spring semester while applying to med-school. In that way, the med-school will have to decide to admit or reject you before ever getting to view your final grade. Heck, you may even be able to take Bio1B over the summer right before med-school starts. Every med-school application has a section that delineates what premed requirements have yet to be completed by the time of application, but will be before you would potentially matriculate at the med-school. Once you’ve actually been admitted to a med-school, you may be able to negotiate with the med-school to not have to take the remaining premed courses at all - under the grounds that they have already admitted you and hence already believe you to be a worthy candidate - or do so on a P/NP basis. {Premed requirements do not strictly require that you take all of your premed courses on a letter-graded basis.} </p>
<p>Now, if you can take Bio1B during a regular semester and get an A, you should obviously simply do that. But not everybody in 1B will get an A, and some students will earn terrible grades. It’s far better to sequester a premed class into a semester where the adcom won’t see the final grade, then to take it during a regular semester and receive a terrible grade.</p>
<p>okay, yeah that is a very different class and I don’t think you should be comparing them. 3A/3B are the ochem classes for bio majors, not chemistry majors. The lab components are designed to make you actually do the labs and understand them. They require a significant amount of work, but most people at Berkeley have no problem with that.</p>
<p>Anyway the thread title itself says that these classes are ‘easy’ compared to most other classes in Berkeley. I don’t know what your problem is.</p>
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<p>How long ago? Grades were lower years ago (at most schools). Most schools appear to have grades about 0.7 higher than in the early 1960s, for example.</p>
<p>^ It was about 25 years ago while I was on a one year sabbatical from the State Department. I do not know what it is like there now but when I attended UMCP the professors in the Physics and Astronomy Departments gave out a grade of A very rarely. If you got a B in a course in one of those departments you were very happy with your accomplishment.</p>
<p>I think I now understand why the OP is unhappy with a B+ in his Chemistry lab. I think a B+ is counted as a 3.3 for calculating GPA. If someone is a pre-med student they need a minimum GPA of 3.5 for acceptance at any U.S. medical school so a B+ does not help him and even hurts him slightly for medical school admissions.</p>
<p>It appears that most of the good state flagships inflated by about 0.3 to 0.4 over the past 25 years (though UMCP does not have data listed at gradeinflation.com). If UMCP followed the pattern, a B then would be like a B+ now, for example.</p>
<p>Of course, grade inflation varies by subject. Nationally, sciences tend to have less grade inflation than humanities.</p>