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By this line of logic, why not just have Berkeley run open admissions? Throw Berkeley open to everybody, including newly released convicts, gangbangers, and basically everybody who wants to go. Why even have an admissions process at all? Just admit everybody.
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<p>Would love to if this was logistically possible. We do force everyone to go to high school (or try, anyway). If we could afford to send everyone to college, or to rehabilitate every convict, I would say go ahead and try (and failure is still okay, but if we had unlimited resources, converting one idiot to a useful member of society is worth it, though entirely unnecessary if we had the resources in the first place, I'll admit). Fact is we can't. Doesn't make it a bad philosophy to follow.</p>
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But don't you see the difference? It's always better for your education to have 10 smart and motivated friends than to have 5 smart and motivated friends and 5 dumb and lazy ones. That's because with 10 strong friends, you can have double the number of interesting and educational conversation than if you only had 5.
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<p>Again, this isn't as clear-cut as you imply. Now it depends on just HOW dumb and lazy my 5 friends are, but if they aren't complete idiots, they often help me keep on top of my own game. When I'm in a class with one of my roommates, we help each other on homework. In EECS, I usually have a better grasp of what's going on than they do. So basically, I get to help my roommate try to understand some concept the professor went through in class by posing it in another matter or explaining it in a different way. That helps me, and it helps my friend.</p>
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Look, the basic issue is that nobody has an infinite amount of time to produce social capital. I can't go and meet and bond with everybody. Socialization is, by necessity, opportunistic. You have the best chance to bond with your roommate because, by necessity, you live with him. Sure, you can choose to invest the time to bond with the genius down the hall, but it's a greater drain on your time and energy, because you see each other less. It would be an easier investment of your social capital if your roommate was that genius. Simple proximity makes things easier for you. Hence, you have to put in more work as a Berkeley student than if you were, say, a Stanford student.
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<p>I agree completely. You think it's significant, I think it's negligible. If you become good friends with the guy down the hall, inevitably you'll be hanging out in each other's rooms a lot. If you want to talk to him, it takes an extra 10 seconds of walking to do so. I see that as a non-issue. I'm not going to lose a friend because he lives across the street from me rather than in my house. Didn't you have such friends when you were younger? Or was your family your only source of companionship? People will seek out the friends they want, and it may take a little more time in Berkeley than in MIT (though, realistically, you have way more people to choose from in Berkeley and have a really diverse set of friends, which I believe is another advantage of Berkeley), but it won't take so long that you will have to bond with an idiot (which, if you really are smart, won't happen anyway).</p>
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Huh? How is it that nobody gets brought down? You just admitted yourself that the top gets brought down. You said that your grades will get brought down. I would argue that more than just your grades get brought down, but your overall level of understanding gets brought down. That's because you probably spent more time doing silly busy work and less time actually learning the lessons that the lab was trying to impart. The purpose of a lab is not to go through the mechanistic motions of performing a lab, but to actually learn the deeper lessons of the lab. You had to spend a lot of time going through the mechanistic motions of the lab. That is most likely not a positive experience.
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<p>Are you implying that grades are the same as education? My grades being brought down does not mean that I learned less (in this scenario; naturally, if your grades came down as a result of bombing a final, that may be different). Now, I completely disagree that a person's understanding would be reduced as a result. The person that gets stuck with the work had better understand the work, and if s/he doesn't, had better learn it really quickly. Pressure forces people to do excellent work. It may suck, and isn't the way things should happen, but it doesn't hurt your understanding of the material. And don't bother with another anecdote, I've got my own on this and they mean nothing.</p>
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The point is, any way you cut it, the top gets brought down. If you are a top student, then why would you want to get brought down, if you can go to another school where you won't be? Seriously, think about how you are going to sell that to a prospective student. You're telling them that there are some bad students, and you may get stuck working with them and basically having to cover for them. Is that something that is really going to attract the top students to come to Berkeley?
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<p>You can't sell that to a prospective student. This is what you tell prospective students: there are 30,000 people here. You have choices. You can find your niche on this campus, and there will be a dozen kids there right with you, no matter how obscure the niche is.</p>
<p>You don't HAVE to get stuck with a bad partner. If you do, it's because you didn't make a friend in that class that was smart. It was because you didn't put in enough effort to not get a bad partner. You think in real life, when you're put into a company and have to work in a group that all your co-workers will be geniuses or something? At Berkeley, you almost always have a choice. If you don't, it makes life suck for a semester, but it doesn't hurt your education. If anything, it helps you learn to deal with that type of crap.</p>
<p>You somehow think that learning in this idealistic box of really smart people that never slack or anything else will somehow be better for an individual's education rather than being exposed to that type of box, but putting that box in the context of the real world and being exposed to that as well. If we lived in a utopia that may be true. On the other hand, I find it useful to know what the real world it like, and find it doesn't hurt me at all to experience that.</p>