So I’m applying to UCSD this application season and I think I have a pretty good chance to get in. I live in San Diego County, La Jolla is a great city and I find the UCSD Campus to be absolutely beautiful. My biggest concern however is that I keep hearing how UCSD curves a majority of its classes causing the students to try and screw one another over and nobody over there is helpful. So I guess I’m asking any current or former UCSD students if this is true or not?
Most classes (at least the primarily math and science classes I took) curve classes to help students, not to hurt them. There is a curve because the test average is low, so they make it so that the average test score is actually a C or a B or whatever they want it to be, rather than what it might have been if they kept the straight percentage (like a D or F). In the vast majority of cases, curves help students.
Most professors I had explicitly stated that they would not curve an exam against the students. What I mean by that is that if every student got an A on the exam, they wouldn’t curve the exam at all. Other professors didn’t explicitly state it, but they still didn’t curve the exams at all if the average was a B. Professors want students to do well. If everyone gets the material and does great on the exams, most professors will let everyone get an A. In the vast majority of cases, everyone can do well and students aren’t penalized for doing well.
I say most because I did have one professor (of the ~50+ professors I had at UCSD) that did a true bell curve (he was a math professor, so I guess who could blame him). So in that class, because students did well and the average was high, it actually took a 93% in the class to get an A-, rather than a 90%. So it happens, but it’s the exception, rather than the rule, in my experience. That being said, no one knew that was going to happen until the end of the class when grades were released, so there would have been no time to be “cutthroat” and “screw” anyone over.
Every student I knew at UCSD were more than willing to help out their classmates. Students have study groups. I had a coworker that started tutoring another student he met on the job because she was having trouble in organic chemistry. I’ve been a part of lots of class-specific facebook groups where students are posting their notes on google docs so everyone can use them and edit in their own notes into them, where students formed study groups, and where students asked and answered class questions. In my experience, the hardest classes are where the students are the most willing to help each other out because everyone needs it. It certainly wasn’t my experience that students were “screwing each other over,” but that was just my experience.
The curve is there to help you, not hurt you. The system does not encourage students to backstab each other or hurt each other because at the end of the day, everyone can do well if they perform well on exams. It doesn’t usually happen because, well, exams are hard and most professors are trying to challenge you. Students don’t do poorly because another student tried to push them down. I’ve had one professor that curved against the class, but I know other students who have never had a professor that did that. It’s certainly against the norm, at least when I was in school.
Ok that helps because I was worried because I kept hearing horror stories that the other students would never help you if you asked or even worse that they would give you false information so that you would do worse and they would do better because of the curve.
Where did you hear the horror stories? Current students at UCSD who experienced it first-hand, or high school classmates or friends?
Even if that were true (which in my case and in my friends’ experiences, it was not, but I also didn’t interact with every single student at UCSD so who knows), there are tons of resources you could use outside of the students in your class to get extra help. You can go to your professor’s office hours or make an appointment to meet with them. You can get help from your TAs, who often have their own office hours (during which, more times than not, they’re just sitting around studying because few students come). Many students underutilize office hours, until right before big exams when it’s probably too late. There are often review sessions before exams run by TAs and sometimes professors. There are discussion sections run by TAs. There are free tutoring options for a lot of the common science and math classes (calculus, physics, general and organic chemistry, etc). There are OASIS workshops (which are extra sessions that meet 1-2x/week and run concurrently with common classes that students struggle with to provide extra help and practice, although you have to sign up for them). The math department has help rooms where you can get drop-in tutoring from math TAs and grad students who staff the room in shifts all throughout the week (expect when there are math classes in there). The chemistry department has a similar setup to give students drop-in tutoring for general chemistry. There’s also a writing center on campus which offers one-on-one appointments, group workshops, and drop-in help for writing assignments. There are probably even more resources that I don’t even know about. These are all school-sponsored resources that where you get help from professors, undergrads who have already done well in the course, and graduate students, none of whom would have any incentive at all to make you do poorly in the class.
And if you still want to get help from other students, you could easily get help from students who are taking the same class but with another professor. There are commonly multiple professors teaching the same subjects, especially the lower-division classes, so if you feel like you can’t trust the students in your own class (for whatever reason), you could always make friends with students in other classes. These could be students in your dorm or that you meet in a club or at work or just walking around campus. Sometimes, this can be really helpful because then it gives you access to different resources (like a different professor’s lecture slides and homework assignments that can be used for practice) that might give you an explanation you understand better than your professor’s or might be helpful when studying. Calculus is calculus no matter what professor you take it with. Students often also take classes at different times than each other (it’s not like high school where all of your friends are likely taking the same classes with you in the exact same order). Because of AP and transfer credits and because you often make friends with people who are in different years in college, you might have friends who have already taken a course that you’re just taking now. I helped a friend with multivariable calculus because I had already taken it earlier, and I had other friends that helped out their friends with organic chemistry because they had already taken it. And don’t discount friends that have never even taken the class before or who may not even go to your school. I helped my roommate with econ one time even though I had never taken the class before–she just needed help figuring out what math they were doing. I helped my friend with her genetics homework, and she gave me the notes from her embryology class when I was having trouble keeping up even though we’ve never gone to the same school since high school.
So even if the horror stories are 100% completely true (which they are not), there are so many other avenues for getting help, even if you don’t trust a single other student in your class (which just sounds silly to me, but I suppose anything is possible).