Last year 2000 students took CS61A: 1000 in the fall, 1000 in the spring. These 2000 included more than 300 of EECS students. Last year 300 students got accepted to L&S CS (an EECS staff said so on Cal day). My calculation is that the success rate of getting into L&S CS is around 18% (=300/1700). That is really tough. Any thoughts?
Not every CS 61A student ends up liking it enough to try for the CS major. Better to look at CS 61C and CS 70 enrollment. But some of them are only doing the minor.
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perhaps a better way of looking at it is how hard it will be to get a 3.3.
Here is the grade distribution from CS61A in fall 2014.
https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/courses/FL/2014/320
(make sure to uncheck previous years if you just want last years)
Total students is 1044.
Distro is as follows:
A+: 45
A: 173
A-: 138
B+: 241
Total A+ through B+: 597
B and below: 447
597/1044 = 57%
57% of people taking it got 3.3+ for that course. Of course this includes EECS people - if you made the assumption all EECS students got B+ or higher, and all non-EECS students were CS majors, both of which may not necessarily be true, then 597-300 = 297 CS students with a B+ or higher.
When you exclude EECS students you get 297/(1044-300) = 40%. Which is not too bad.
Also, according to the CS61A website, the grading scale is absolute, not relative to how well others do.
Taken from the CS61A course website: “This grading formula implies that there is no curve; your grade will depend only on how well you do, and not on how well everyone else does.” from http://cs61a.org/about.html
so no worrying about competition.
Also keep in mind many people taking 61A might not be majoring in CS:
“While some of the increased demand is linked to the growth of the computer science major, these courses also increasingly appeal to those outside the major, as computer literacy is “increasingly viewed by undergraduates as a core academic and professional competency,” the report said.”
from http://www.dailycal.org/2013/09/02/increased-cs-course-demand-leads-to-overflowing-auditorium/
Also, just looked up the CS61B distribution, 62% of people got B+ or higher in Spring 2014.
Also a somewhat reassuring sentence from the CS61B website, just like for CS61A: “Your grade will depend solely on how well you do, and not on how well everyone else does.”
So perhaps getting a 3.3 GPA in these intro courses would not be so hard after all? I kept hearing the statistic that the average GPA was only 2.7 in these lower division CS classes. I was previously thinking I better not risk entering L&S CS. Thank you for the link Masterball.
“perhaps a better way of looking at it is how hard it will be to get a 3.3”
I thought as long as you get 3.0 in your prerequisites, you are automatically accepted to L&S CS.
@StevenToCollege On Cal day they said that L&S CS enrollment has grown by 300% in the past 3 years when staff have remained the same. So they want to raise the GPA requirement from 3.0 to 3.3 this fall.
The only surprise is that this didn’t happen sooner. At the rate students are trying to declare the major, it will probably keep going up. This is why my son didn’t apply via that route, even though he knew chances were slim for EECS directly. The requirement doesn’t seem too onerous, but who wants to spend freshman year of college stressing out over GPA?
Or I think they might change to the best students with highest GPA get in like UCSD.
Actually, they stated specifically that they wouldn’t do that. They used a hard cap (# of students) in the past when enrollment spiked in the program and they feel it was more stressful and unfair for students not knowing how well they needed to do to get in.
The number of students in the department is much much higher than it has ever been before. They are bursting at the seems (like CS everywhere else apparently).
PS the new cutoff is only for new students. Current students need only meet the old cutoff.