The main issue has been the large fraction of L&S going into CS once they are in. So limiting direct entry can only ever be a partial fix unless they strongly restrict the discoverer slots. Since they have declared that they will no longer use GPAs, the new selections they use for that will be critical.
Not really. The discoverer path will have a set quota of slots and it wouldnât matter how many people apply. There are lots of other programs that have similar process - Haas, ORMS etc. and holistic process should take care of things even if every single applicant has a 4.0 GPA in the declaration courses.
OK, I didnât see where it says that the âdiscovererâ path has limited slots, or that there will be some holistic process. The last thing I saw posted noted that current L&S students would not be restricted from declaring CS. However, I see there is a proposal that supports all you say:
So it looks like they do finally have a solid plan.
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Major outcomes are basically the same. Until just a few days ago, the only difference in coursework was a Physics 7 series. Now, they dropped the EE 16B course for L&S CS as a requirement but they can take it if they want to.
âThere is no difference in the computer science course content between the EECS and CS Majors-- the difference is what other subjects youâd like to study.â
That plan was dated April 2021, so there could have been changes since then.
A hard cap on the number of L&S CS students (mostly filled by direct admits) means that âdiscoverersâ will have to face a competitive admission process (rather than a known pre-set college GPA) to enter L&S CS.
Business has a holistic competitive admission process. Other L&S majors with capacity issues including ORMS generally use a pre-set college GPA for admission. However, ORMS seems to have an additional waitlist process that appears to be first-come-first-served: ORMS - UC Berkeley IEOR Department - Industrial Engineering & Operations Research .
I mean that there are tons of kids applying to UCs and have their essays done. They can easily decide to apply to Berkeley and click EECS.
At MIT, they would need to create a whole new application in a new application portal, so that self selects a lot.
At Stanford there are several supplemental essays so that adds self selection too.
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Although that document is noted as being from April 2021, the link comes from a reddit post from April 28th 2022. The document was created around that date. However, I canât say for sure that they had simply included the wrong year.