<p>I met a guy whose last name was vicissitudes and whose first name was sakky.</p>
<p>These CC coincidences are starting to get creepy. :eek:</p>
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It doesn't make them special; it just makes them more prepared.
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<p>It might. The admissions officer should look at the entire application and make a determination whether this is in fact true. I believe the only advantage that an AP course will give you in a similar college course it that you will have to work and study less to get the same benefits as a student that hasn't taken an AP course. If a student demonstrates hard work and dedication, that means this gap is irrelevant, and it doesn't require AP tests, IB tests, or any such tests to demonstrate a strong work ethic.</p>
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But if the student has absolutely nothing to show, then even if he is very intelligent, Berkeley doesn't know that.
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<p>I think doing well in everything accessible to you is something to show. If the student demonstrates s/he is exceptional in the context if his/her situation, I believe that counts far more than simply having taken an AP test (if, in context, that is something unexceptional). If we agree on this point, then I think we're on the same page.</p>
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You know, I think the guy was Korean. It could have been Yoo-Din. Or you know, some kind of Korean name that sounds like "Eudean." I didn't know that was your actual first name.
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<p>Yeah, it's actually Mandarin Chinese, so it's unlikely the same if the guy was actually Korean. Interesting, nonetheless.</p>
<p>Really? I can see "De" and "An" but "Eu" doesn't exactly make up a word.</p>
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I met a guy whose last name was vicissitudes and whose first name was sakky.</p>
<p>These CC coincidences are starting to get creepy.
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<p>CardinalFocused, "Sakky Vicissitudes" is a horrible name. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^ hahaha</p>
<p>so...yea.</p>
<p>Do you know Mandarin? I don't, actually, but I can try to explain the pronunciation to some extent.</p>
<p>The first name is actually two characters, the first of which is more like "Yo" and the second is "dean". For the normal pronunciation I usually describe it as "Eugene with a 'd'".</p>
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Well, from the way sakky describes the situation, it appears that the student in question had less than a 2.0 at Berkeley. It could have very well been a 1.0 or less over several semesters. Since most colleges only allow students to transfer if they have 3.0+, it appears likely that even if sakky's friend did go to community college, he would have to take an unnaturally large amount of units and do well in them in order to get an overall 3.0. But if you're working at FedEx and (probably) have a family, taking such a course load might prove to be impossible. You might as well just wait till your kids grow up and hope they learned from your mistakes and help you when you're older.
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<p>You're pretty accurate (except for the family part - he's married now but he doesn't have kids). And you've just encapsulated the heart of the problem. </p>
<p>The real problem to me is simple - he was made worse off by Berkeley. Specifically, if he had never gone to Berkeley at all, and just went right into the workforce, he'd be OK now. He could have been an immature and irresponsible 17-18 year old in the workforce, getting fired at multiple jobs. But from an academic standpoint, it wouldn't really have mattered. He would have still been able to go to a CalState or a lower UC (or even Berkeley itself, once he had sowed his wild oats and matured) purely on the strength of his good high school record. But he decided to go to Berkeley, where he screwed up, and his Berkeley academic record will haunt him forever. It's sad. It would actually have been better for him to not have gone to Berkeley at all, and that's just sad.</p>
<p>That's why I support reforms to give students a clean slate. Seriously - all that bad stuff happened a long time ago. He's a different man now - a mature man, a responsible husband, with a good work ethic. Yes, he was an irresponsible teenager who behaved foolishlessly. He admits that. But what does that matter now? Think of it this way. Driving records are refreshed every x number of years (I think 5 years) - such that if you rack up a huge number of speeding tickets and other moving violations, all that stuff gets wiped from your record after those years pass. Same thing with your credit report - even personal bankruptcies are, by law, wiped from your credit report every 7-10 years. Hence, I think that somebody who flunked out of college should have their academic record wiped out after a certain number of years. Or if not wiped out, at least shielded from other schools. That would allow people to move on with their lives with a clean slate. </p>
<p>Of course, a better option would have been to not admit the guy in the first place. In the case of this guy, he should not have been admitted to EECS. He probably would have graduated from L&S, but not from EECS, and that's because he simply didn't have the technical high school background to be ready for EECS. He never took any of the advanced science/math classes in high school (even though they were offered). He had no AP credits in any science/math classes (although he could have). I think it's fairly clear to both him and me that he was not a good admit for EECS. He probably could have graduated from L&S, but by the time he wanted to go to L&S, he had fallen into the major trap of being trapped in engineering because his grades were too low to allow him to switch to L&S. </p>
<p>It's a sad situation all around.</p>
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How about establishing a special kind of scholarship for URMs, similar to Regent Scholars, say, a scholarship for outstanding minority students?
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<p>I'm pretty sure this would be illegal under Prop 209. </p>
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Of course Berkeley loses many of them to HYPS! Berkeley is less prestigious and students of all colors tend to blindly choose based on prestige.
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<p>Well, first, I think you've just implicitly conceded the problem . The solution is for then for Berkeley to increase its prestige. But that won't happen without changes. </p>
<p>Secondly, I don't think URM's are blinded by prestige, at least not prestige the way it is generally understood. One of Harvard's biggest competitors for the top African-American students are the historically black colleges such as Morehouse and Spelman. Granted, those colleges are prestigious within the African-American community, but obviously less so for the nation at large. But the point is, URM images of prestige are not always consonant with the societal concept of general prestige.</p>
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Your metric is completely unproven and unfairly punishes a group of people that have no control over their situation. I mean, just go to south central LA and tell them, "No matter what classes you take, no matter how good you do, you cannot get into Berkeley by this policy. Sorry." It doesn't matter if one of them gets perfect marks on everything, was an exceptional athlete and/or musician, clearly extremeley talented--but no calculus, no AP sciences, no IB, no community college because s/he couldn't due to financial or other circumstances.</p>
<p>I agree that the classes a student has taken should be factored in to admissions, but only in a reasonable fashion. I believe that the admissions officers should be able to decide if a student is prepared for Berkeley or not based on the entire application without blacklisting someone for something they had no control over. Yeah, we can toss out the 2.0GPA students pretty quickly, but there's a good reason for that. Same with the 800SAT students. There isn't a good justification for doing it with the applications you're talking about.
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<p>First off, this continues to presume that my reforms really would hit on poor URM's. I don't know that it will. My reforms might just as well hit on lazy rich whites and Asians - people who I definitely don't think belong at Berkeley. For example, I suspect that we would find cases of rich students who clearly did not take challenging courses in high school, then came to Berkeley and lolly-gagged around and then flunked out/dropped out. These students should not have been admitted to Berkeley in the first place to free up spots for somebody who is actually does want to work hard. </p>
<p>If you don't think these people exist, go to Frat House Row sometime during the middle of the regular school year. You're going to students there that, frankly, haven't been to class in weeks and have been doing little more than just partying and drinking since the semester started. The truth is, sadly, there are a lot of lazy students at Berkeley who are just not interested in studying. Why did Berkeley admit these people? </p>
<p>But secondly, even if my reforms do hit on URM's, you're quibbling about details. Remember what we're talking about - we're not talking about a system that forecloses admissions to ALL people. Just those who weren't going to graduate anyway. If there really are people from South Central who come to Berkeley and actually graduate, then a proper data mining experiment would be able to identify these people and still admit them. In fact, properly run, the software would be able to identify MORE of these people and admit them. What the software would do is recommend not admitting those people from South Central who weren't going to graduate anyway. </p>
<p>Let's not also forget that some people in South Central are also lazy. It's not like everybody who comes from a poor neighborhood but gets admitted is a hard-working person. Laziness is a universal trait that is exhibited in both the rich and the poor. What you want to do is reject lazy people, whoever they are.</p>
<p>Look, no statistical survey is perfect. I think of this the way that insurance companies do actuary studies. For example, statistically, men get into worse car accidents than women do. That's why car insurance companies tend to charge higher premiums to men than to women. In some sense, that's not "fair" to men, especially those men who never crash at all. But the reality is that, statistically, men are more prone to car accidents than women, and you can't ignore that reality. Similarly, young men are more likely to crash than old men, because young men are more likely to race and engage in dangerous behavior like drinking and driving, plus the fact that young men are less experienced drivers. People who live in bad neighborhoods are more likely to have their car stolen. People who live in rural areas are less likely to crash than people in thick urban areas (because there is less to crash into). Insurance companies take all this information and use it to spit out a premium cost, or in extreme cases, refuse to provide insurance at all. The same is true of other insurance. Life insurance tends to be more expensive for men than women for the simple reason that women tend to live longer than men. </p>
<p>Again, one coul say that it's not "fair" that insurance companies charge different rates to different people. But the underlying truth is that life is not fair. Specifically, it's not "fair" to me as a man that women tend to live longer than I do. I want to live a long life. It's not "fair" that women tend to live more years than I do. But that's the reality. It wasn't "fair" that I got charged a small fortune for my car insurance when I was 16, especially because I didn't get into any accidents. But it's a simple reflection of reality that young men tend to crash a lot. I didn't, but a lot of other young men, including many of my high school friends, did. What insurance rates are are a simple reflection of statistical reality. You ignore reality at your peril. That's why I recommend that Berkeley also take into account statistical reality through a revamped admissions process.</p>
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Well if that's the case, it's interesting that you keep using him as an example. Because if you want Berkeley to change for the better (not admitting people who can't make it,) I think it's fairly obvious that it already has changed - at least in certain ways. I strongly doubt "unqualified for Berkeley" poor, URM students are being provided with the R&C Scholarship nowdays. Since that is probably so, it may just be the case that instead of coming to Berkeley and getting lots of loans, these students have chosen to go to a lower UC that did offer them R&C or a CSU/CC. Likewise, I doubt there is AA in EECS admission anymore and I think that can be confirmed by the EXTREME lack of darker, non-Filipino faces in both lower and upper div tech classes at Berkeley. So, unless AA comes back, your friend's story is rather outdated and might not provide an accurate picture of Berkeley's admission "mistakes" among current or future undergrads.
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<p>I never raised the issue of the RC scholarship, because it's not relevant to this discussion. I am not talking about somebody who got the scholarship and then lost it (which did happen to him). I am simply talking about somebody who couldn't even graduate at all. The fact that he won the RC scholarship (almost certainly due to his ethnicity) therefore has nothing to do with the issue of whether he could graduate or not. </p>
<p>However, on a larger note, I think that things are probably better now. That's not to say that I completely support Prop209, as I do think there is something to be said for the notion of admitting people based on potential, even if they went to a bad school. But it has to be real potential, not "imagined" potential. Specifically, just because somebody is a URM that goes to a bad school, yet still gets good grades, doesn't automatically mean that he has potential. It may just mean that his school is just so darn easy (because there are so many bad students) that this student can do very little work and still get top grades at that school. But that's what I would imagine my data-mining software would be able to ascertain. Maybe he really does have potential, in which case, I would have no problem in admitting him. </p>
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. You had me up to there. You're saying that one year makes a difference? Gimme a break. I began attending Berkeley at 17 and have not dropped out. Keep it relevant. You <em>might</em> have had a point if he was 7-years old and not a prodigy (and had really rich parents who donated a large sum of money).
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<p>Whether he's 17 or 18 years old, it hardly makes a difference. My point is, teenagers and young adults are often times immature and make dumb mistakes. You didn't, and I didn't, but you can't ignore reality that a lot of them do behave foolishlessly. That's my point - somebody should not have to forever pay for the rest of his life for stupid things that he did when he was only 17 or 18. </p>
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Yes. Do you realize how cushy the college life is? All you have to do it spend 2 hours filling out some stuff you did in high school, write a few essays, and mail in the application with $80. It's expensive, but then they give you somewhere to live and something to do for four years.</p>
<p>What if he didn't go to college? He'd have to live on his own, find an apartment, a job for a high school graduate (likely not far above minimum wage), and start really taking care of himself. If that's fair, I don't see why it isn't fair for a 17-year old to spend a few hours learning about where s/he will spend the next 4 years of his/her life.
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<p>I hardly think that this is worse than going to college. He's a Hispanic, and not to stereotype, but lots of Hispanics like to live at home with their family. In fact, after he flunked out, he immediately moved back home. It's not that hard to have a nice lifestyle when you don't have to pay the rent or the food. Why not? That's exactly what his sister and his brother did. They didn't go to college. They just lived at home and got jobs. </p>
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Yes. Do you realize how cushy the college life is? All you have to do it spend 2 hours filling out some stuff you did in high school, write a few essays, and mail in the application with $80. It's expensive, but then they give you somewhere to live and something to do for four years.</p>
<p>What if he didn't go to college? He'd have to live on his own, find an apartment, a job for a high school graduate (likely not far above minimum wage), and start really taking care of himself. If that's fair, I don't see why it isn't fair for a 17-year old to spend a few hours learning about where s/he will spend the next 4 years of his/her life.
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<p>But don't you see that you've just implicitly conceded my basic point? Even if everything that you said is right, then that's just all the more reason for Berkeley to not have admitted him in the first place. Why admit somebody who can't/doesn't want to do the work?</p>
<p>I think you have to admit that, if nothing else, Berkeley made a mistake in admitting him (at least to EECS).</p>