<p>With Prop 30 passage, Berkeley has added courses and sections to help students get the required courses they need.</p>
<p>Most Berkeley students on this board have not complained about getting classes.
UC is also generous with AP credits allowing students to bypass some of the more basic lower-division prerequisites.</p>
<p>This is not true in the College of Letters and Sciences. AP credits count for units that can be used towards graduation – so some people are capable of graduating early, but for the most part you don’t get waived out of lower-divs.</p>
in my opinion the student body at CAL makes the school great even today. and the administrators are an inbred mafia–that will try and destroy your life. take only smaller classes with professors who actually grade their own papers. don’t take any classes with TA’s–that is the biggest scam of all time. TA’s that generally are overworked and abused and have no clue what they are doing. frankly they are unqualified to teach and should never be allowed to grade papers. i am a 3rd generation CAL graduate, it really is the administration brining that school down. like many other California public schools. the school was so dirty that i used to bring cleaning supplies, white board eraser, and markers. and before classes stared washed down the desks and cleaned the boards. the bathrooms were appalling, and i used to find the cleaning staff sleeping in the halls when i would arrive early in the mornings. outrageous. again, i loved some of the teachers and all of my classmates. and the grade deflation is killing graduates who have a hard time getting jobs. tech companies all want to check GPA’s now. really lame. i arrived with a 3.97 and left with a 3.4, because no matter how high i scored–those TA’s would give me an A minus (3.7). even with a 96.5 on the overall class. go bears.
None of this is surprising given California’s budget woes. The fact is that the UC system has been starved of money for decades. It also has been too slow to grow its endowment: compare UC with Michigan or UVA. Sad what the voters of California have done to their public university system.
Not to revive a super old thread, but I feel exactly the same as the OP as a new UCI transfer. The UC system really is a joke.
I’m being forced into retaking lower division classes I have already taken. My classes are 400+ students and the lectures cover material I’ve already been taught. I’m bored to death in class because of this and I feel like I just flushed $5K down the toilet for Fall quarter. I can also confirm that the TA’s that lead discussions are complete trash.
I mean, what the hell? Do UC students really like their school? Or do they just not know any different?
I regret not going to Santa Clara University instead, extra $10k per year be damned.
And you would not believe the redundancy of classes offered across different departments, the ridiculous amount of bureaucracy on campus and the borderline stupid amount of pre-requisites for almost any upper division class. I can see already that administration is super inefficient in that they force kids to take a long series of classes for nearly all majors, which makes a double major nearly impossible, and a large portion of that long list of prereqs probably overlaps significantly with another class in another department teaching the exact same shit except that we are paying for it in tuition because multiple faculty across multiple departments are being paid to teach redundant material. And, we are stuck in school longer completing a BS list of prereqs, while at the same time, we are limited in that taking classes outside of our major in nearly impossible.
And perhaps the worst of it all, the faculty, in my experience, do not give a damn. Our grades are curved, artificially, in such a way to ensure that 45% of the class get’s a final grade of a “C” and that 15% gets a final grade of a “D” and that, no matter what, a sad group of 5% (out of 400+ mind you) will be walking out of class with an artificial “F” as a final grade. Completely fucking over that student and their future. That’s just wrong and I am completely upset that the school allows this practice to go on.
In fact, I dislike my experience so much that I might consider not returning after Fall quarter.
And here is another thing, want to take calculus as a transfer student, but didn’t take it before you transferred. Well, you can forget just signing up for Intro to Calculus, no no no. You have to pay $25 to purchase an online evaluating software, and then you have to work through the problems, independently, until you have completed 225 problems twice and get more than 70% of those 225 problems right, on the second try only, before you are even allowed to enroll in basic calc. What total bullshit, especially since I have already taken algebra 2 and Analysis and Trigonometry – what the hell else do I need to do to sign up for a basic calc class? I mean, Christ.
It’s like they legitimately don’t want students to sign up for the course. WTF?!
There isn’t a whole lot of educating going on here.
@fleetfeet2016 I don’t think UC students like their schools at all. That doesn’t mean there isn’t school pride - the UCLA people I work with say that the negative experience is what actually bound them together, as everyone that goes through a public school experiences the struggle of graduating, to varying extents. I transferred to USC out of a public school and they make it sound like I should be ashamed that I didn’t put myself the rest of the way through some masochistic struggle to prove something. It’s not like my engineering classes don’t also get curved down to a C+/B- and also have incompetent TAs but at least I can get my classes even as an entering student, and when I walk into an advisor’s office, I get a smile rather than dagger-eyes because I disturbed their solitaire game.
It’s like a rite of passage - they feel proud to have earned their degree from an academically rigorous institution when the entire school, from administrative staff to competitive students, are trying to fail them or prevent them from graduating. This doesn’t give them the atmosphere to “love” the school, or the people at that school outside of their circle of friends and roommates. They do get to talk about how much harder they have it than private school kids though, and I think their mutual hate for USC and Stanford are amongst their strongest unifying qualities.
I’ve also heard the perspective that the UCs are equal-employment opportunity employers as mandated by govt. funding stipulations, so they are forced to hire some highly underqualified individuals into positions that have a direct influence on student’s lives. Supposedly, these individuals are incredibly bitter and mean towards students because they never had the opportunity themselves to attend the institution at which their job is to help these kids achieve great things.
@epicer Good God. Things are much worse than I thought.
I can not believe people would take pride in how shitty their school makes life for them. That is the most ass-backwards statement I have ever heard in my life.
I’m seriously considering transferring to Occidental next Fall. I don’t believe I should have to put of with this BS – this is not what school, or education, is about. Jesus Christ, I am just completely flabbergasted at this entire UC “culture.”
Looks like the problems you are describing in #24 are specific to UCI. For example, Berkeley does not have mandatory placement testing before enrolling in calculus 1, for example (an advisory placement test is offered free at https://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/placement-exam ). Of course, if you needed calculus 1, why did you not take it while at your CC?
But then your other thread says that you decided to attend SCU. Why are you now griping about UCI?
I couldn’t go to SCU because they didn’t meet full need. I made a mistake and should have applied to Occidental, College of the Holy Cross or Colgate instead. Hell, I think I should have applied to Boston College, Notre Dame and Georgetown too, but what’s done is done in this regard.
I chose UCI instead, without ever visiting, since I assumed it would be great because its a higher ranked UC and I thought they had a certain minimum standard they were upheld too. Turns out my expectations were too high for Irvine. (Just for the record, UC’s at full price, including room and board and a meal plan is equivalent to my EFC. In other words, no matter where I go, I’d have to pay around $25,000-$30,000 per year – private or public).
I began as an English major at Community College and so I was busy doing the American and British literature sequence instead of Calc. I just took a stats class to meet IGETC and applied to transfer. And in all honesty, I wasn’t confident that my gpa wouldn’t take a hit if I did take Calc at community college. I had hoped that my school would support me in my ability to take the class after transferring. I didn’t get the memo that UC’s treat their undergrads like trash.
To be fair, I had no mentors through this entire process. I had to figure it all out on my own since my parents were unsupportive and they didn’t know a damned thing about colleges, where was good, how much it costs or what you learn at college. My mom just became successful through networking. All she knows how to do is write well with good grammar. Besides this basic skill she doesn’t really know how to do anything else besides algebra. I mean, that’s what you would expect with a high school diploma thuogh.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty I suppose. My future children will be attending LAC’s, that’s all I can say at this point.
I understand, but it’s more than just the Clac barrier. It’s the student body, climate, grade deflation and attitude of the administration that I ultimately don’t like much. I hoped that the school would be a close knit community where the faculty and staff worked for students, but instead it seems like people have adopted a sink or swim attitude.
All I can say is that I made a huge mistake choosing the public university when I knew I should have tried for a small private school that focused on community and a unified mission.
I totally screwed up with the “fit” aspect of college selection. And maybe I’ll apply to transfer Fall 2016, but I’ve already taken out loans at UCI that make it hard for me to justify the cost of another two years of school. It just really sucks.
To all upcoming freshman reading this thread – pick your school based on fit. To make sure you won’t get stuck in the situation I was stuck in, make sure you apply to schools that meet 100% need and nothing less. If you like the large public research university atmosphere then make sure you really know what you’re getting yourself into before you SIR.