My thoughts on Berkeley

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>Economics is a social science and since social science classes are “soft,” econ would be under that category. This is not to say that econ is easy, but it’s still “soft” in that it just is. Logic and philosophy are also soft/fuzzy even though they’re probably very rigorous. It’s simply because they all fall under the Social Science category.</p>

<p>Looking through the course catalog, there are definitely “hard” and “soft” econ courses and there are almost certainly econ courses that require much more mathematical sophistication then the average biology course, but it is still overall “soft” (again, just because it is under the umbrella of a social science).</p>

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<p>It is probably to demonstrate the diversity at Berkeley come from. It is to show that not everyone came from the same background and that not everyone has the same beliefs. What surprised me most was the large amount of first-generation students. I expected around 30% but over three quarters of the people in the room stood up.</p>

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<p>Well, frankly (and sadly), I find nothing strange about that in the least, and in fact speaks to the very reason why logical reasoning is not taught in those classes. Simply put - students in many humanities courses don’t really need to know that. Those courses do not place high demands on their students, such that they can state a bunch of random observations and assertions and still pass, often times with quite reasonable grades. </p>

<p>As a case in point, I know one guy who took a humanities course that shall remain unnamed for which neither did he never attended, but he also never read any of the books either. Course grading was based on essays based on the books, so all he did was read some of the Amazon.com user descriptions of the books, amalgamated them into a bunch of assertions, and received a final course grade of an A- (and the only reason he didn’t receive a solid A was because he got an attendance grade of zero because he never showed up). I remember him laughing at the end of the semester, saying that he probably spent no more than a total of 8 hours on that course for the entire semester. </p>

<p>The basic problem is that many humanities courses simply don’t hold students to high standards, and many students therefore use humanities majors simply as a means to slide by to a Berkeley degree. They don’t know the material, and they don’t want to know the material - and the courses don’t require them to know it. </p>

<p>To be fair, certainly there are many highly dedicated humanities students as well. The real shame is that the unmotivated humanities students who are just looking for an easy degree ruin the major for the dedicated students, for they make all humanities students look bad.</p>

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<p>What I meant by soft is easy, as was used in a previous post.</p>

<p>The majors I listed are all actually rather technical (and considered hard social sciences)</p>

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<p>I think, though, what I find strange is the root cause of students not having to do it. Where did the concept that it’s OK to just state a bunch of garbage in such a class actually come to pass?</p>

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<p>One theory that has gained credence has to do with the politics of the 1960’s. Colleges at that time were viewed by many students as a means to obtain student deferments to avoid the Vietnam War draft, and much modern grade inflation can be traced back to that decade as faculty realized that assigning failing grades might ultimately mean a literal death sentence for their students who flunk out, lose their deferments, and are then conscripted to fight a war that many faculty members did not support. That policy of grade inflation then took root even after the country abolished the military draft, as organizational inertia tends to keep policies in place long after the original impetus for those policies has disappeared. Some of the former college students of the Vietnam War era are themselves now faculty members and, having received inflated grades when they were students, now bestow inflated grades upon current students. </p>

<p>As an example, both George W. Bush and John Kerry had been excoriated for their relatively mediocre grades at Yale - with Kerry receiving 5 D’s - yet both of them spent their college years immediately before the Vietnam War draft and hence were subjected to the harsher grading schemes of the time. Yale professors freely admitted that both would be receiving higher grades if they had been at Yale today. </p>

<p>Based on what Smith recalls teaching that year, Kerry scored a 71 and 79 in two of Smith’s courses. When Smith was told those scores, he responded: ''Uh, oh. I thought he was good student. Those aren’t very good grades." To put the grades in perspective, Smith said that he had a well-earned reputation for being tough, and noted that such grades would probably be about 10 points higher in a similar class today because of the impact of what he called ''grade inflation."</p>

<p>[Yale</a> grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student/]Yale”>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student/)</p>

<p>Of course the immediate question that that theory begs is why grade inflation seemed to occur only amongst the humanities and social sciences, and not also the natural sciences, math, and engineering departments as well. One nihilistic explanation is that faculty members in the latter departments cared less if their students were consigned to fight and die in Vietnam, perhaps because those faculty were more politically conservative and tended to support the war (one might postulate a connection between the quantitative departments, military research, and the US military-industrial complex). It would be interesting indeed to compare those students who tried to major in engineering or natural sciences, flunked out, and hence were drafted to fight (and perhaps die) in Vietnam vs. their contemporaries who majored in humanities or social sciences and who would have flunked out if not for grade inflation and therefore avoided the war entirely.</p>

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<p>^ That is a very interesting theory. Certainly some of the science and engineering departments could have been more intimately connected with military research, and one may also consider that even today, the math, science and engineering departments seem much less politically active at a U like Berkeley. When the protests were going on, and fire alarms were pulled whilst the rain poured on, basically all of the math dept seemed hardly to support the cause, and many began even ignoring the alarms.</p>

<p>Do you have specifics as to why this theory might be credible? For instance, actual concrete measures that the standards changed before and after the war?</p>

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<p>In the late 1950’s, the average cumulative GPA for Berkeley undergraduates was 2.50 and has increased to approximately 3.25. A significant increase in the GPA occurred during the Vietnam War when students received a draft deferment if they remained in good academic standing.</p>

<p>[Undergraduate</a> Education Colloquium, The College of Letters and Science, UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html]Undergraduate”>http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html)</p>

<p>*There are many theories about when and why this jump in grade expectations occurred. Some credit college draft deferments during the Vietnam War.</p>

<p>Faculty felt both pressure and sympathy for students who might get drafted if their grades fell too low.*</p>

<p>[Grade</a> inflation is not a victimless crime / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com](<a href=“http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0503/p09s01-coop.html]Grade”>Grade inflation is not a victimless crime - CSMonitor.com)</p>

<p>*“The advent of the Vietnam War draft institution,” as Donald Green, political science and psychology professor, called it, “was among the litany of causes” contributing to grade inflation in the post-war era. *</p>

<p>[New</a> theories renew grade-inflation debate | Feb 16, 2001](<a href=“yaleherald.com”>yaleherald.com)</p>

<p>The view that average students deserve better than C’s gained the upper hand, most observers agree, during the Vietnam War, when academic principles ran up against the brutal reality that flunking out of school could get a student shipped off to combat. Instructors, facing life-and-death decisions, dramatically cut back on the D’s and F’s; undergraduates pressed for still higher grades so they could get into graduate school and prolong their student deferments. The mean grade shot up from a nice round C to a point somewhere in the B’s.</p>

<p>[Grade</a> Inflation](<a href=“http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/04/23/GRADE_INFLATION.html]Grade”>Grade Inflation)</p>

<p>*Increased attention and sensitivity to personal crisis situations for students. The most obvious example was the Vietnam War era. Poor grades exposed male students to the military draft. Many professors and institutions adopted liberal grading policies to minimize the likelihood of low *</p>

<p>[Grade</a> Inflation Article – Teaching Resources — Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning — Minnesota State University, Mankato](<a href=“The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning | Minnesota State University, Mankato”>The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning | Minnesota State University, Mankato)</p>

<p>*In the 1960s, the nation first saw grade inflation because of the Vietnam War, said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke professor who runs a Web site concerning grade inflation.</p>

<p>“If students flunked out, they would go to Vietnam,” he said. “Professors inflated grades to make sure that students could avoid the draft.”*</p>

<p>[UNC</a> to discuss grade in?ation | dailytarheel.com](<a href=“http://www.dailytarheel.com/content/unc-discuss-grade-inflation]UNC”>http://www.dailytarheel.com/content/unc-discuss-grade-inflation)</p>

<p>*“It’s probably true that grade inflation is higher in the humanities departments [as compared to the math and science departments],” said professor Patrick Byrne, chair of the philosophy department. “There was huge grade inflation around the Vietnam War when professors didn’t want to jeopardize students’ draft status. The typical C plus average went up to a B minus.” *</p>

<p>[The</a> Heights - Professors and students examine grade inflation](<a href=“http://www.bcheights.com/2.6178/professors-and-students-examine-grade-inflation-1.922668]The”>http://www.bcheights.com/2.6178/professors-and-students-examine-grade-inflation-1.922668)</p>

<p>*“The prevailing theory for the sharp [nationwide] increase in grades over the 1965 to 1975 period is that professors became more lenient in grading over the period in order to protect students that were avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War,” the report stated. *</p>

<p>[The</a> Whitworthian - Study shows increase in mean GPA](<a href=“HugeDomains.com”>HugeDomains.com)</p>

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<p>Wow…</p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

<p>Do any sources discuss the humanities/SS v. technical/scientific disciplines?</p>

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<p>Actually, for my honors thesis – I was expected to bring something new to the table.</p>

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<p>uhm, i’m not even going to read this LOL.</p>

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<p>See my post #12.</p>

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<p>Sakky, I have a question - what do you think <em>should</em> be done?</p>

<p>Knowing you, the solution you’d give wouldn’t be to make the humanities just as likely to flunk people out (as people who were admitted under a poor admissions system to a program which they aren’t able to handle would then not have the option of transferring and at least graduating with a Berkeley degree). Would it be some combo of increasing standards in the humanities without making them traps where students can flunk out fairly easily, and allowing for relatively free transit from COE to L&S? Perhaps you would also prefer the style in the COE is about figuring out the material, and does less of the 50% exam is an A business.</p>

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<p>I support the general tightening of admissions standards and the right for engineering and science students to cancel the grades of former engineering & science grades for former students who switch to other majors: if you’re not going to major in engineering anymore, who cares what your engineering grades were? Let those students walk away with clean slates. </p>

<p>The general notion of a ‘grade budget’ for each department where only a certain percentage of each letter grade can be handed out by all of the undergraduate courses within any particular semester. {Note, I exclude graduate courses from the budget as grading in grad school is relatively meaningless, as what really matters is the quality of your research. No grad student ever obtained a top academic placement or industrial research job because of top graduate school grades.} Note, this budget could be ‘borrowed upon’ during unusual semesters if an unusually worthy cohort of students takes your departments’ courses in a particular semester, you could award higher percentage of A’s that semester, but only at the cost of fewer A’s in later semesters. {The laws of statistics would deem unlikely the chances of having a slew of unusually worthy cohorts in a row.}</p>

<p>However, I suspect that such an idea would be politically infeasible. Hence, another idea would be to simply provide on official student transcripts information about the grading schemes used in each course taken by that student. For example, next to the grade assigned to that student for the course would be printed the median grade assigned for that particular course. Furthermore, alongside your official GPA would be printed the ‘hypothetical’ GPA of a ‘matched’ student who took precisely the same coursework that you took, and received the median grade every time (whatever that median grade may be for each course). Receiving a B in a course where the median grade was a C would then be a clearly far more impressive achievement than receiving a B in a course where the median grade was an A. One could even supplement that idea by calculating a “scaled” GPA that incorporated the grade distribution assigned by each course you took, measuring where you stood relative to that distribution, and then calculated an overall percentile and corresponding ‘modified GPA’. A student in the 90th percentile in EECS would therefore have a modified GPA equivalent to a student in the 90th percentile in American Studies, even if the former had, say, a 3.5 “raw” GPA and the latter had a 3.8. </p>

<p>The various levels of honors distinction could henceforth be calculated via these percentiles, rather than what often times happens now, with many engineering students diligently ‘shopping’ for easy humanities and social science A’s during their senior year in order to breach the honors threshold. More importantly, the academic probation threshold could also be modified to a more realistic lowest X-percentile calculation tailored to your coursework rather than a fixed 2.0 GPA cutoff for all. Surely I am not the only one who finds it odd that, as I strongly suspect to be true, a disproportionately high proportion of students subjected to probation or dismissal happen to be engineering majors rather than, say, ‘Studies’ majors. </p>

<p>However, even that solution obviously still has a problem in that different majors draw students with different talent levels. For example, it is well known that the College of Engineering enacts higher admissions standards than does L&S - CoE admittees even having higher average SAT Verbal scores. We could therefore also include on transcripts information about the average SAT and weighted high school GPA’s of the ‘hypothetical’ matched student who took the exact same coursework you took.</p>

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<p>I guess the reason for this is that even though almost everyone knows which major was astronomically harder to complete, scholarship apps, and other things (say medical school, law school) may not take the contrast into account sufficiently unless they have a number staring them in their faces. Yes, this is likely an important thing.</p>

<p>There probably is a substantial pool of employers for whom such a comparison GPA would not be necessary, because they’ll simply have regarded the eng. degree more highly anyway. But I do imagine some application processes have more weight on GPA as a number.</p>

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<p>Those who put down Econ as a fluff major:</p>

<p>Take Econ 101A, 103, 104 & 141. Only then will you be knowledge enough to speak.</p>

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<p>But you’re not required to do any of that to major in Econ. You could simply take the ‘lighter’ required sequence of 100AB and 140 along with a ‘historical elective’ sequence of Econ 105, 113, 115, History 159A and 159B where, let’s face it, you can basically weasel your way through by arguing one particular historical school of thought, shockingly without even really needing much of a baseline of knowledge. As a case in point, Econ 105 doesn’t have any economics prerequisites at all, not even Econ 1, and Econ 113 & 115 have only Econ 1 as prereqs. </p>

<p>Even if economic history is not to your taste, you can still find a way to mix and match a grouping of economics upper division courses to construct a path of least resistance. In contrast, the chemical engineers have to take ChemE 140,141,142,150A,150B,152, 154, 160, and 162, many of which are weeders. They have no opportunity to substitute ChemE 140 and 141 for a lighter regimen in the manner that Economics students can eschew Econ 101AB in favor of 100AB. They have to take ChemE 140 and 141 whether they like it or not. </p>

<p>Now certainly your point is taken that economics students can undertake a brutally difficult course sequence - indeed, even more difficult than the one you proposed. But you don’t have to do that. Indeed, many economics students will slide by with the flimsiest possible acceptable sequence. Those students make the more dedicated econ students look bad.</p>

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<p>I would also recommend ‘unit-credit’ reform as well. Let’s face it - certain courses are far more time consuming than other courses that are worth the same number of unit-credits. Lab and/or project oriented engineering and science courses are the most notorious example - for example, I highly doubt that a single person would seriously argue that Chemistry 115 consumes no more time than, say, American Studies 101 despite both of them ostensibly both being worth the same 4 units of credit. Chemistry 115 requires a whopping eleven hours of lab a week, not to mention additional study and lab preparation/writeup work on your own time.</p>