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Overcrowded? How's that? The impacted majors are not the biggest majors at the school. MCB is the largest siingle major graduating almost as many students as the entire College of Engineering (580 vs. 720). Yet MCB isn't impacted. Poli-sci is the 2nd largest major on campus (with about 500 students per year graduating), yet poli-sci is not impacted. The impacted majors are all relatively small compared to those 2 majors. Economics, for example, only graduates about 320 students. Yet, for some reason, Econ is impacted. Why?
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<p>You know the answer to that. I'll only tell you because you asked: because we have more faculty in some areas than others. Some fields get more money. Why does Haas get a really nice building while Cory is held together with duct tape? Haas gets extra money. You take one side of the equation without balancing the other. I mean, I could naively say that every major at Berkeley must be impacted because we have 22,000 students, while every major at MIT must not be because they have 6,000 students. What about the number of faculty and the resources of each school (or department)?</p>
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And what about those people who have the choice to go to one of the top private schools? Is going to Berkeley a better choice, given that impaction is a problem?
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<p>For a good student, Berkeley is a roughly equal choice. I won't say strictly better or worse, because like I always say I don't deal in those terms. I will say that Berkeley won't be a significantly better or worse choice than a private school in terms of the quality of education received.</p>
<p>For a bad student, a private school may be a better choice because they cannot qualify for their desired major at Berkeley. That's not to say they'll get a better education necessarily (or that it will matter, because they're not good students to begin with), but that they may prefer a private school (and again, this preference would not have a correlation to quality of eduation).</p>
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Well, first off, you have people like greatesteyn admitting that she actually LIKES it when people can't get the major they want, because it makes her feel superior. In other words, she obtains enjoyment off people's misery.
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<p>Completely irrelevant. Why even mention this? You asked whether people seriously preferred impacted majors, and I said yes (and so did greatestyen). Your question may have been rhetorical, but its answer may still surprise you. Go ask some students. One of my roommates and his project partner (for a summer CS course) both said they preferred impacted majors when I asked them today. No coercion, just a straight "Do you prefer having impacted majors or not?"</p>
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ike I said, MCB and poli-sci apparently have enough resources to accomodate everybody. They're the 2 largest majors on campus. So if they can be so large and yet accomodate everybody, that indicates that resources clearly exist. The resources are just not optimized.
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<p>Yes, because we all know that MCB professors and Poli-Sci professors can teach EECS courses. First of all, resources ARE optimized. They're the two largest majors on campus, therefore they need the resources. If we were to transfer those resources to EECS, that wouldn't suddenly make Poli-Sci and MCB the not largest majors on campus. That would make them the largest majors on campus with fewer resources. Which would be bad. It would be great if we had a net increase in resources overall, but seeing as how money doesn't grow on trees, we have a pretty good balance of resources. There isn't a huge contingency of people that can't get what they want. Most people are happy with things the way they are.</p>
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So if MCB can do it, then why can't a far smaller and far less expensive major like Mass Comm do it? MCB graduated 580 undergrads in 2005. MCB has never been impacted. Mass Comm had to enact impaction because they couldn't handle more than 140? Come on, what's wrong with this picture?
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<p>You've answered your own question. Which would be a smarter solution: overestimate the resources needed for MCB, so 580 students could get what they need in that major? Or underestimate those needs and shift them over to Mass Comm, where 140 people could make use of them? Yes, we theoretically could strike the ideal balance, but being realistic, I'd much rather the budget people overestimate resources for MCB, which more people want to major in, than overestimate for Mass Comm, which they aren't expecting many to major in in the first place. It's the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective.</p>
<p>Furthermore, you imply that it is somehow easy to hire quality professors. While I can't speak on the quality of professors in MCB and/or Mass Comm, I presume Cal follows standard practices of getting high quality professors. It's not exactly an easy thing to say, fire two MCB professors and hire two Mass Comm ones to fix a disparity. That's just now how the system works (otherwise no one would become a professor, since there would be no job security).</p>
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This is all about trying to make Berkeley a better school. I am becoming increasingly convinced that many people just don't want Berkeley to become a better school. Hence, all of the resistance to my ideas. You don't even want to try to solve the problem of impaction. At least somebody like greatesteyn admits that she has ulterior motives as to why she doesn't want impaction solved.
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<p>We're resisting your ideas because they're faulty. If you could make a clear, convincing argument in which I couldn't find significant faults, I'd be behind you 100%. There's a lot of things Berkeley could improve on, I'll be the first to admit it. I'd love to see Cory remodeled (or at least cleaned once in a decade), I'd like professor rating systems like are provided in EECS for all departments, and I'd like to see those ratings play a moderate role in the salaries of teachers (or some other incentive to get them to increase those ratings).</p>
<p>Some things I just don't see improving Berkeley education significantly. For example, my own desire to see Cory remodeled would do almost nothing for educational quality--as long as we have chairs and blackboards, we'll be fine. I do believe a quality professor rating system for each department would significantly improve the quality of education (discovering the EECS one tends to significantly improve the quality of eduaction of EECS majors, I find--we tend to specifically choose good profs and reap the rewards of that).</p>
<p>See, consider this rating system. Name a reasonable counter-argument to it. It has been proven effective, as shown by the EECS department. The cost to run it is minimal--a bunch of scantrons and a couple of hours of scanning is all. Certainly the benefits would outweigh the costs in the minds of a vast majority of the students (find one that wouldn't want such a feature). Now this is a point I truly believe there is no serious debate about, unlike impacted majors. Bring up arguments like this and we can talk about improving Berkeley. Your arguments will help us steal students from Stanford (and other privates), which to me doesn't significantly improve a student's education at Berkeley.</p>