<p>then leave me a message on facebook. otherwise, i cant track you down.</p>
<p>No, no, no. Its time for papa bear to go bedy-bye. Good night you wacky ccers!</p>
<p>papa bear? interesting....</p>
<p>cc is emailing me from all corners. stop replying you psychos. must read laurence sterne. ;)</p>
<p>Wow, college senior. i'm glad you're finally able to express your opinions whch you've pent up for years. Do tell us when you're done, alright?</p>
<p>LoL, that was a fast response, I thought I'd at least have a day since you guys should have classes and sleep. Guess not.</p>
<p>I reported everyone of your threads as being offensive to mods, because I disagreed with them.</p>
<p>Thats just something I learned at Berkeley.</p>
<p>I'm reading and working on a paper, college senior, so I'm awake. You have had strange teachers if that is the practice that you have learned while here. But lets have a new kind of post, college senior. Why don't you talk about the good parts of Berkeley? You are capable of it, I know you are. Could you do it for me?</p>
<p>I also don't like being called racist. I hate people of all colors and stripes equally with the same fervent hate. That is when I'm not shooting things with my many guns or marry my cousins. Hyuk.</p>
<p>C'mon college senior, aren't you better than this? Or are you part of the problem here at Berkely? But let me guess, it's the institutions fault, and the rude Californians they let in that caused you to become this way.</p>
<p>The good things about the Berkeley experience is</p>
<p>1) It eventually ends.
2) you will realize everybody else that goes here will die eventually.
3) the realization that after you leave, Berkeley is one of the few American cities within range of a nuclear strike from North Korea.
4) the knowledge that due to the San Andreas fault, Berkeley will one day either sink to the bottom of the ocean or be destroyed by a cataclysm.
5) the Republican party can continue to bash this city as long as it exists for being a liberal failure.
6) If you change awkward, and demure silence to happy smiles and cheating with moral fortitude, Berkeley is a social paradise.
7) Its in America, and America at least totally rules.</p>
<p>I am not hateful, I merely made this post so people who are applying to berkeley would get an idea of what its like. Sorry to burst your bubble kiddo. I'm sure you had a lot of illusions on what that berkeley degree means.</p>
<p>I know what the degree means, and yes, college senior, you do seem hateful- have you read your posts? </p>
<p>Thank you very much. Now I think the readers can see what they've been missing. Again, I'm truly sorry you hated your time here, and that you didn't transfer after knowing that you hated the place, and wish you happiness and luck in the future.</p>
<p>Do you realize that you're the image you paint? Welcome to reality.</p>
<p>The image I paint is of someone sacrosanct and facetious in the face of unyieldingly huge egos.</p>
<p>Do you realize the image you paint?</p>
<p>Clinging to your dreams of self-worth and that Berkeley diploma? Not realizing that wheras Berkeley was on par with Harvard and Yale a mere generation ago, it is slowly sinking into mediocrity under the weight of bureacratic mismanagement and irresponsible governance? When a generation from now the undergraduate program descends into the ranks of the truly mediocre and a new generation of children dream of a life-changing experience of college, Berkeley wont't even be whispered among them? When you brag to acquaintainces you have a Berkeley degree, and most give you a blank stare and say, "Berkeley who?"</p>
<p>Its ok though, when people have invested in something, they usually feel some sort of superficial attachment to it, like Political Donors who like to call old dutch a "friend" because they gave him money. The sad thing is, you're not betting on a winner, but a loser.</p>
<p>The world is behind in Berkeley's backsliding. Do I think that the Berkeley diploma is the golden key to life? No, I'm not foolish. I do realize that it's a bachelors, that it's a stepping stone to a job, to graduate school, to law school, where many succesful Berkeley graduates go every year. Perhaps other schools are gaining prowess on Berkeley. Fine, so be it. Did you try to change that? I'm not going to brag- it's a school. People who brag about where they went to school need to get over themselves. </p>
<p>College senior, I have little invested in my degree. Really, the money for it was accumulating in an account throughout my life. I'm betting on my pretty good undergraduate institution, and it's afforded me many opportunities I would otherwise not have been able to do, even while I've been here for such a short time. Why didn't you do more to change the place, especially if you stayed and did not transfer? You're the one who invested the huge sum of money. Why not make the place better?</p>
<p>College Senior,</p>
<p>Do you have any proof that Berkeley was considered on par with Harvard or Yale? It's always been considered a powerhouse, but Harvard or Yale level? I'd like some evidence.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The image I paint is of someone sacrosanct and facetious in the face of unyieldingly huge egos.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sacrosanct? You're sacred and inviolable?</p>
<p>
[quote]
You are unfairly, and without evidence, casting aspersions on the integrity of hard working students who transfer into UC Berkeley or other UCs by inferring that students who attend junior colleges are doing so to skip weeder courses that students on the freshman-admit track must take. A person works hard to overcome their high school grades so they can succeed in life and you imply bad motives to their efforts? That's pretty nasty isn't it?</p>
<p>The students I am specifically talking about here are students who, for whatever reason, do not get good enough grades in high school to be admitted to a UC campus right out of high school. Therefore, even if they wanted to attend a UC campus right out of high school they would not be able to do so. It is both illogical and unfair to accuse someone who does not qualify to get into a UC campus out of high school of trying to skip "weeder" courses at a UC campus if it is impossible for them to get into a UC campus. For your theory to work; you would have to assume that students plan to get bad grades in high school so that they can go to a junior college for the specific purpose of avoiding "weeder courses" at UC. I doubt that any students who are not interested enough to get good grades in high school are plotting and scheming to get out of "weeder courses" at UC.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I never said that these were the specific machinations of the transfer students themselves. My beef is with the transfer PROCESS, and specifically with the administrators who run the process. </p>
<p>The issue is that the administration has set up a system where the transfer students can skip over weeders. I agree that the transfer students did not create this system, but they are nevertheless benefitting from it. For example, only a handful of powerful South African whites created the Apartheid political system, but all whites benefitted from it (relative to all the non-whites). It was only a handful of powerful white politicians in the US South that maintained the racial distinctions through Jim Crow, but all whites benefitted. If my father works as a hit-man and murders somebody for a million dollars, and then I inherit that money, the fact that I did not personally commit the murder doesn't take away from the fact that that money is still blood money. </p>
<p>I personally don't understand why you keep battling me on this front. I am not trying to blame anybody, but simply trying to propose a better, more just system. I believe that the transfer students are getting an unfair advantage because they are allowed to skip the weeders that the freshman-admits have to take. Whether this was deliberate or inadvertent, it doesn't matter, it's still unjust. So either you don't believe the present system of weeder-skipping is unjust (and I don't see how it isn't), or you think it is unjust but you don't care. If it's the latter, then I would say that that's a chilling position to take. You believe that a system is unjust, but you choose to support that system anyway and shout down anybody who attempts to correct the injustice.</p>
<p>
[quote]
but how exactly are you taking action to change the admissions process? (And heck, some people here may think I don't belong here. So who is to say exactly?) It's not like you can approach the admissions office and say "oi, here's the stuff I want you to get done."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I have one simple, non-controversial proposal. Berkeley should work harder to figure out who isn't going to graduate anyway, and simply not admit these people in the first place. After all, why admit somebody who isn't going to graduate? What's the point in that? </p>
<p>To figure out who that might be, I would propose that Berkeley simply go back through all its old historical data and perform some statistical data-mining on it to determine which students in the past were highly likely to not make it to graduation, and then simply admit fewer people with those characteristics in the future. For example, if one particular high school in California produced an unusually high percentage of Berkeley flunkouts, then the answer would be to simply admit fewer students from that high school. </p>
<p>Obviously you aren't going to be able to get to a 100% graduation rate, but I have to believe that you can do better than what is happening currently. </p>
<p>Some might think that this proposal is cruel in the sense that I am restricting the number of students entering Berkeley. However, I think the exact opposite is true - my proposal is actually compassionate. It is compassionate in the sense that students won't waste their time coming to Berkeley only to flunk out or drop out because it's too hard or they're not ready for it. By bringing in students who aren't going to graduate, you're just wasting everybody's time, especially the student's time.</p>
<p>Sakky,</p>
<p>There's one problem with your high school suggestion:</p>
<p>Many high schools improve or decline over time. </p>
<p>Let's just be honest: Stop admitting people with really low stats. It's a much easier way of handling things than your suggestion, which is liable to be inaccurate over long periods of time.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I believe that the transfer students are getting an unfair advantage because they are allowed to skip the weeders that the freshman-admits have to take.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If transfers are performing as well in upper-div classes that require a functional knowledge from the weeders, I still don't see why you can argue that they're lacking necessary skills.</p>
<p>The problem with your weeder ideas is that you can't have the students repeating classes, but they need to take them to transfer. It's a Catch-22 for both sides.</p>