Scared of Berkeley?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
21

<p>
[quote]
UCLAri,</p>

<p>I noticed you turned down some really impressive institutions for UCLA I was just curious about what factors influenced your decision. Family closer to LA? Great Area etc? Some of those Ivies have very small classes and I've heard the educational focus on undergraduates is keen.</p>

<p>Thanks!

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</p>

<p>First off, UCLA was my dream school, and nothing was going to get in the way of that. However, the biggest factor was "feel" and "fit." I know most of the people on this board think that the most important thing for college is ranking, but I was concerned with how I would fit in at that school. I visited a lot of schools before choosing UCLA, and none of them had an impact on me as UCLA did. </p>

<p>I also have to admit, a full-ride for the first two years sold me. </p>

<p>But to be honest, I don't think that there's that big of a difference between UCLA, Berkeley, and Brown in terms of what's available. I studied abroad, in Washington, DC, wrote a senior thesis, learned two languages, etc. Could I have done these at Cal and Brown? Of course. But then again, I also wouldn't have gotten the most amazing campus and the ability to go to Santa Monica every Saturday morning to study. </p>

<p>In the end, I don't know if I made the "right" decision for the prestige whores around here. I know I made the right decision for myself, however. And really, I can always go to a "higher ranked" school for grad school anyway.</p>

22

<p>
[quote]
I don't know your relation to Berkeley, sakky, but I've been told by actual Berkeley counselors and medical school interviewers that med schools know how tough Berkeley is, and it weighs in their decision

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<p>Them counselors and interviewers can say whatever they want, but I would argue that the data about which Berkeley premeds actually get admitted speaks loud and clear. The data strongly indicates that nobody cares about how difficult the grading at Berkeley is. If they cared, then evidence of that would be shown in the data. Berkeley premeds who are getting into med-school would have lower GPA's than the average GPA at that particular med-school. The data does not show that in the least. </p>

<p>Hey, if you don't believe it, look at the data, and you tell me what's going on. </p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>
[quote]
Did anyone else notice the rather large disparity in Law School admits from Cal compared with other, arguably easier schools. For example, USD had 44 people apply and 21 got in. The average gpa was 3.47 and LSAT was 163. Loyola in LA had 52 apply and 20 get in. The average gpa was 3.57 and the LSAT was 162. Now Cal on the other hand had 132 people apply with only 19 getting in. Average gpa was 3.89 and LSAT was 168. What's the deal?

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<p>GentlemenandScholar, I think you misunderstood the data. The data is not talking about which prelaws are getting into Berkeley Boalt Law School. The data is talking about what law schools Berkeley prelaws are getting into. </p>

<p>For example, it is not that 44 prelaws from USD applied to Berkeley Boalt and 21 got in. Rather, it is that 44 Berkeley prelaws applied to USD Law, and 21 got in (and those who got in had an average of 3.47 and 163). Similarly, 52 Berkeley prelaws applied to Loyola Law and 20 got in. And then 132 Berkeley prelaws applied to Berkeley Boalt, and 19 got in. </p>

<p>The takehome point is to illustrate the kinds of grades that Berkeley prelaws have historically needed to get into various law schools. Clearly going to Berkeley does not guarantee you admission to a top law school. Far from it in fact. In fact, it doesn't even guarantee you admission to a lower-tier law school. As you can see from the data, plenty of Berkeley students apply to lower-tier law schools like Golden Gate Law and STILL get rejected. </p>

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grad schools weight the grade accordingly......like an A in stanford is actually only counted as a B while an A in berkeley is counted as an A =)

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<p>I wish that were true, but sadly it seems not to be so. </p>

<p>I can't show you the data for Stanford premeds, because Stanford won't post that stuff online. However, I do have the Princeton premed data. I think Princeton is a pretty good substitute for Stanford, as they both have roughly equivalent grade inflation. </p>

<p>Let's first take a look at Berkeley and Princeton premeds who apply to the UC med-schools. Notice how I am stacking the deck in favor of the Berkeley premeds, because the UC med-schools give strong admissions preference to California state residents, and a far greater percentage of Berkeley students are California state residents compared to Princeton students. </p>

<p>Nevertheless, here are the average admitted GPA's of, first, the Berkeley premeds and, secondly, the Princeton premeds at the various UC med-schools:</p>

<p>UCSF Med- 3.85, 3.73
UCLA Med - 3.85, 3.62
UCSD Med - 3.85, 3.68
UCIrvine Med - 3.87, 3.58
UCDavis Med - 3.74, 3.62</p>

<p>Notice how in each and every UC Med-school, Princeton premeds were admitted WITH LOWER AVERAGE GPA's than were Berkeley premeds. Each and every time. Berkeley has deflated grades relative to Berkeley, yet the UC Med-schools demand that Berkeley premeds have HIGHER grades in order to get in. That's right - Berkeley premeds have to have HIGHER grades to get in. </p>

<p>Let's look at a few more med-schools to see if the trends change.</p>

<p>Harvard Medical - 3.96, 3.79
Johns Hopkins Med - 3.91, 3.81
Washington University in St. Louis Med - 3.88, 3.78
Duke Med - 3.89, 3.81
Stanford Med - 3.91, 3.77
Yale Med - 3.78, 3.71
University of Pennsylvania Med - 3.95, 3.77
Columbia Med - 3.93, 3.66</p>

<p>I think I can stop now because I think my point has been emphatically made. In each and every case, to get into the top med-schools, Berkeley premeds require HIGHER Gpa's than do Berkeley premeds. It's not just one or two med-schools I'm talking about. It's nearly all of them. </p>

<p>If you don't believe what I'm saying, here is the raw data. You can parse it yourself and convince yourself that what I am saying is true. </p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/top20.stm&lt;/a>
<a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/data98-03.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/data98-03.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>So these Berkeley counselors and med-school admissions officers can talk all day and all night about how the difficulty of Berkeley is understood by the adcoms and how they adjust for it, etc. etc. Yet look at what the actual data says. Look at the gpa's of those who are getting admitted, and then you tell me whether that squares with what those counselors and adcom officers are telling you.</p>

23

<p>Sakky,</p>

<p>Then again, the issue might not be the quality of the applicants, but the sheer number of Berkeley applicant pool each year.</p>

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<p>First of all, I doubt that the size of the Berkeley applicant pool is the problem. I am not talking about the percentage of Berkeley students getting admitted (which I agree might be affected by the size of the applicant pool) but rather the gpa's of those who are admitted. The only way that that would be affected is if med-schools are basically running a defacto quota system of only admitting X number of Berkeley premeds per year, and hence taking only the very best ones to fill that quota. I don't think med-schools are doing that. After all, many if not most of the top med-schools have more former Harvard and Stanford premeds than they have former Berkeley premeds. For example, ask yourself why would UCSF Med have no problem in taking lots of Stanford premeds, but then apply quotas to the Berkeley premeds to keep their numbers low?</p>

<p><a href="http://home.sandiego.edu/%7Ee_cook/vault/medical/sanfrancisco/ucsf-med-97.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://home.sandiego.edu/~e_cook/vault/medical/sanfrancisco/ucsf-med-97.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>{You also have to wonder why is it that Stanford can get a roughly equal number of its students into UCSF Med as Berkeley does despite the fact that Berkeley has nearly 4 times the number of undergrads that Stanford has. But I digress...}</p>

<p>But second of all, let's say that you're right. Let's say that it has nothing to do with the quality of the applicants, but in fact has to do with the sheer size of the Berkeley applicant pool. I'm afraid to say that, at the end of the day, the end result is still the same. The fact is, for whatever reason, the med-school adcoms are not giving the proper credit to Berkeley's grade deflation. We can argue about why they are not doing it, but the fact is, it doesn't really matter why they're not doing it, the only thing that really matters is that, for whatever reason, they are not doing it.</p>

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<p>wow Sakky you make me glad that I turned down UCB</p>

<p>btw, how does duke compare?</p>

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<p>sakky,</p>

<p>I never said my end result was better. It still sucks. I just think that it's safe to say that the fact that a billion Berkeley students apply each year for a program is bound to hurt the lower tier of applicants.</p>

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<p>sakky annoys me, really. he/she spends an inordinate amount of time looking for "viable stats" to back up criticism that no one asked for. sakky kind of reminds me of byerly in the harvard threads, except that sakky seems to be a cal student which really makes it worse.</p>

<p>in fact, to me the biggest tragedy is this - that someone at cal (sakky) actually has so much time on his/her hands and is so flatout bored that he/she can come to a forum like this everyday to go on and on when everyone ceases to care. sigh.</p>

<p>i hope not all of berkeley is not like sakky.</p>

28

<p>lefay- I agree. If s/he hates berkeley so much, why waste time complaining about it on these boards. The people who come here know all about what you think of Cal, Sakky. Transfer somewhere else or shut up.</p>

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<p>All of Berkeley is Not like Sakky,</p>

<pre><code> However, she consistently brings up valuable statistics. It's really dissappointing to read these posts, but I'm sure it's true. Nearly every grad school fair I've gone to emphatically states "If you're from Berkeley we definitely take that into account regarding your gpa". If you listen to the hum of hundreds of students at the Berkeley fair you can here the question asked incessantly "Was it WORTH it attending Berkeley and getting a lower gpa, or should I have attended another school and achieved a 4.0" Every booth repeatedly says (of course) OF COURSE you should have gone to Berkeley, we definitely take it into account! We average gpas of Berkeley students yadda yadda. I have always been very skeptical of this fact, and sakky's data is pretty clear. I'd say it's true in most cases. I do know people that were accepted to top graduate programs with low gpas but it's because of their research experience. Keep in mind that it's your saving grace at Berkeley if you're worried about your gpa. A friend of mine was admitted to Berkeley/UCSF joint PhD in Biomedical Engineering with a 2.7 gpa but he worked in a lab with the physics nobel laureate so he was accepted everywhere with a FAR inferior gpa. This happens all the time. My gpa wasn't exemplary but I had wide acceptances because of demonstrated research. Essentially NON professional programs want the promise of lab capability if you've demonstrated that you're very strong in that area (which is SO much easier to do than get a 4.0 at Berkeley IMHO) than you needn't sweat quite SO much about gpa.
</code></pre>

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<p>Just gotta work harder than people at other schools probably, but it gets much easier as you go along. Used to struggle to get As and A-s, now I can do it with barely thinking about it.</p>

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<p>andrewtdx, do you attend berkeley? if so what major?</p>

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<p>This is all freaking me out now, lol. I'm probably going to go insane, run up into the redwoods, and never come down.</p>

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<p>sakky:</p>

<p>help me interpret the data ....in 2004 76 kids from Stanford applied to law school and only ONE got it, or is that one admit to Stanford's law school?</p>

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<p>bluebayou: 76 from berkeley applied to stanford law, out of which 3 got admitted, and 1 matriculated</p>

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<p>I know this is OT, but it seems to bear on the issue of grade "deflation" at Berkeley. Sakky's point about medical schools seems to be that the only deflation that anyone should care about is "effective" deflation; that is, when a lower GPA at UCB will get you the same recognition as a higher GPA elsewhere. </p>

<p>Taking the law school stats posted earlier from UCB and applying them across 12 schools (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, UCB, UVA, UMich, Chicago, UPenn, Gtown, Duke), and comparing them to those for my own school, I got to some surprising conclusions:</p>

<ul>
<li>UCB has uniformly higher acceptance rates than UVA (except for Yale and Stanford, where the sample sizes are so small that the difference may be suspect). avg was 22% UCB vs 17% for UVA</li>
<li>The GPA of students admitted to these schools was on average .1475 points higher for students coming out of Berkeley (that difference is a lot larger than it sounds). The difference was statistically significant beyond the .001 level. </li>
</ul>

<p>I can see that the small number of acceptances coming out of some of these schools means that the difference can be easily skewed, but the difference is still rather large. This Sakky-esque analysis seems to indicate that UCB has less 'effective' grade deflation than UVA. Could it be?</p>

<p>The only other school I found publishing similar statistics was Yale. Their acceptances are uniformly higher than UCB's, but the GPA is more analogous to Virginia.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.career.virginia.edu/students/preprof/prelaw/LSAT-GPA04.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.career.virginia.edu/students/preprof/prelaw/LSAT-GPA04.pdf&lt;/a>
<a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/Law/lawStats.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/Law/lawStats.stm&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.yale.edu/career/students/gradprof/lawschool/media/statistics2003.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.yale.edu/career/students/gradprof/lawschool/media/statistics2003.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>What Sakky seems to forget (or neglect) is that these figures/stats posted on the career website are self-reported. You can surf through the Berkeley medical acceptance figures and you'd never come to the conclusion that 28 of UCSF's CURRENT 1st year med students are UC Berkeley grads. THAT'S 20% OF THE ENTIRE class. AND there are a couple more in the MD/PhD program. Where did I get this figure? From an MCB-affairs interview with UCSF medical admissions officers posted outside the MCB office in the Valley Life Sciences Building. Check it out yourself. Did Harvard or Stanford send 28 people to UCSF? Probably never in history.</p>

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<p>Yup, there's a HUGE amount of Berkeley grads in UCSF right now. More than any other school. This is one of the finest medical schools in the world. Berkeley can't be that bad.</p>

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<p>Berkeley Rocks!!!</p>

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<p>Yes, yes it does. </p>

<p>Let's all take a moment in silence to think about how awesome Berkeley is.</p>

<p>Mmmmmm....</p>

40

<p>
[quote]
sakky annoys me, really. he/she spends an inordinate amount of time looking for "viable stats" to back up criticism that no one asked for

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<p>First off, I wasn't the one who made the assertion that med-schools 'understand' that Berkeley is a difficult school and will perform GPA compensation accordingly. Somebody else made that assertion. I provide data to challenge that assertion.</p>

<p>Secondly, if you don't like my posts, then fair enough, don't read them. I'm not forcing you to look at my stats. I choose to provide information, you choose whether you want to look at it or not. If you don't want to look at it, fine, don't look at it. Just don't say later that nobody showed you the data.</p>

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lefay- I agree. If s/he hates berkeley so much, why waste time complaining about it on these boards. The people who come here know all about what you think of Cal, Sakky. Transfer somewhere else or shut up.

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<p>Oh, I see, easymack63, so it's "like that". So if there are bad/negative things going on, you don't want to hear about them. Hence, all the people who go to Berkeley and enjoy it should be allowed to post freely about their positive experiences, but people who go to Berkeley and dislike it should not be allowed to say anything, is that the deal? In other words, censorship. </p>

<p>Hey man, hate to break it to you this way, but cc is not an arm of the Berkeley marketing department. CC is a free discussion forum where people are supposed to be able to express a diverse set of opinions. Why even have a discussion forum if only certain opinions are allowed to be expressed? That's like choosing to read only the positive reviews (but deliberately ignoring the negative reviews) of a movie you are thinking of seeing. </p>

<p>On a far more serious note, if you come to Berkeley, you are quickly going to find out that there are quite a few things that are wrong with the school. There are also quite a few very good things about the school as well, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Berkeley has some rather serious problems. How do you think you would react if you were having a bad experience at Berkeley and somebody told you to that you were not allowed to talk about it? Would you simply sit down and shut up? Exactly, I didn't think you would. </p>

<p>
[quote]
sakky:</p>

<p>help me interpret the data ....in 2004 76 kids from Stanford applied to law school and only ONE got it, or is that one admit to Stanford's law school?

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</p>

<p>In 2004, 76 prelaws FROM BERKELEY applied to Stanford Law, and one ultimately matriculated (3 got in, of those 3, one of them chose to go). Yes, that's right, 76 Berkeley prelaws applied to Stanford Law School, 3 got in, 1 is taking it. </p>

<p>And of those 3 who got in, the average GPA was a 3.99, the average LSAT was a 170.</p>

<p>Is it clear now? </p>

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[quote]
What Sakky seems to forget (or neglect) is that these figures/stats posted on the career website are self-reported.

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<p>You're absolutely right, the figures are self-reported. And that's why my analysis never dealt with absolute numbers but rather only with percentages. </p>

<p>However, the whole 'self-reporting' gambit has a simple parry. Berkeley's data is self-reported. But so is the Princeton data. So is the data from Harvard. So is the data from MIT. So is the data from Yale. So is the data from Virginia. So is the data from any almost other school. So if Berkeley's self-reported data is skewed, then so would be the data from the other schools. I don't see any reason why the Berkeley self-reported data be any MORE skewed than any other school's self-reported data. If you have a theory as to why that might be the case, I'm all ears. </p>

<p>I believe that when you are comparing the self-reported data of 2 schools, the skewing cuts both ways and is therefore a wash. If you disagree, then by all means, lay out a rationale as to why the Berkeley data is more skewed than everybody else's. </p>

<p>
[quote]
you'd never come to the conclusion that 28 of UCSF's CURRENT 1st year med students are UC Berkeley grads. THAT'S 20% OF THE ENTIRE class. AND there are a couple more in the MD/PhD program. Where did I get this figure? From an MCB-affairs interview with UCSF medical admissions officers posted outside the MCB office in the Valley Life Sciences Building. Check it out yourself. Did Harvard or Stanford send 28 people to UCSF? Probably never in history.

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<p>If you're going to bluff, be prepared to have your bluff called. Let's look at the data.</p>

<p><a href="http://home.sandiego.edu/%7Ee_cook/vault/medical/sanfrancisco/ucsf-med-97.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://home.sandiego.edu/~e_cook/vault/medical/sanfrancisco/ucsf-med-97.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Now, granted, that was just the data on who got admitted, not on who actually matriculated. I am sure that of the 38 Stanford and 28 Harvard premeds who got into UCSF Med that year, many chose to go elsewhere that they thought would be better, like Harvard Med or Johns Hopkins Med or whatever. But the point is that Harvard and Stanford could have sent 28 students to UCSF Med if everybody who got in chose to go. </p>

<p>Let's also keep in mind that the Stanford and Harvard student bodies are far far smaller than the Berkeley student body is, so Berkeley should be getting far more students into UCSF. Let's also keep in mind that a far greater proportion of Berkeley students than Stanford/Harvard students are California residents (because the student bodies of Stanford and Harvard draw from a much wider nationwide population pool than Berkeley does) and hence Berkeley premeds tend to benefit from state-resident admissions preference and state tuition subsidies from UCSF more so than do Stanford/Harvard premeds.</p>