<p>Well tastybeef, I definitely agree there are some very stupid, questionable decisions Berkeley makes. In my experience, however, private schools I’ve observed, at least the so-called HYP ones, tend to be much more ambiguous with how they admit their students. If their average SAT scores are higher, that’s just because they are more selective. But we all know that they assemble classes, and don’t admit individuals, so frequently it’ll be weird as hell why one guy got in, and another didn’t.</p>
<p>The same has happened with Berkeley students, though I think at least less frequently. I think it’s horrible, and agree Berkeley should shape up, but I really think on average as a public university, Berkeley doesn’t fool around TOO much with student profiles, given it, like many UC’s, has a formulaic admissions process, a large part of which involves numbers. </p>
<p>I agree there are plenty of flaky L&S students. The question is, how many times does one hear of these really stellar academic students getting rejected, with someone else unpredictably making it in? I don’t think this happens as often in any public school, but I could be wrong. If it is happening often, or even on a noticeable scale, honestly I am disappointed in Berkeley in an extreme fashion.</p>
As an Asian, who probably got in here more on SAT subject tests (Math 2 = 790, Bio E = 770, my GPA was the average for admissions for the year before mine) and extracurriculars than anything else, I am going to second this.</p>
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Very true. I used the solve() function for every question and got a 790; had I had programs to use I would have done even better.
This thing was also useful for the SAT Reasoning math portions. I pretty much inflated all my math scores for the SAT Reasoning test and 2C Subject, further weakening the credibility of the SATs</p>
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<p>-To be frank good SAT scores can be more or less ‘bought’ by the rich who have large excesses of money to pay for expensive SAT courses. The SAT is a highly teachable test.</p>
<p>-The UC system does not have the time to interview every applicant; there are far too many applicants</p>
<p>-On top of that, they get to skip all the fun of large intro weeder classes. not all majors have weeder classes. The plurality of transfers are English major; English majors have no weeder courses to have to deal with.</p>
<p>-Not all transfers are transfers because they couldn’t get in after high school, a lot of them could not afford to get in after high school.</p>
<p>HYP admits all have one thing in common-- a strong academic record. They all have high GPA’s and SAT scores. Almost 95% of the time, private schools screen for academic performance first as a predictor of academic potential, and then they look at all the personal background factors. This is a lot more like grad school admissions. For example, med schools get your academic record and your primary essays. After this initial screening for numbers and whatnot, they start giving out secondaries, then interviews, and finally acceptances. This makes more sense than bypassing the academic record and skipping straight to the personal factors.</p>
<p>Honestly, people want doctors who are competent, not doctors who have a bunch of sob stories and excuses. If a doctor is competent and has sob stories, fine, whatever. The same is true for college grads. Employers want people who has solid track records, not those who have excuses.</p>
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<p>Some of them are indeed more selective. But why can’t Berkeley be more selective and retain the many brilliant Californians who would rather go to private schools? Of course, Berkeley would have to attract them through other means than just toughening up admission standards, but that’s one way to start.</p>
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<p>Berkeley’s holistic review process basically makes it impossible for anyone to know what it is looking for. There may be a number scheme going on, who knows? But we always hear about those kids who have 4.3+ UC GPA and 2200+ SAT who get rejected from Berkeley and those with 3.8’s and 1700 SAT who gets in. I’ve personally seen a lot of this on this forum.</p>
<p>What you refer to as stochastic in private school admissions is far less random than Berkeley’s. The academic record disparity between top admits and bottom admits into Berkeley is far, far greater than those for private schools.</p>
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<p>A common misconception. It’s easy to do well on the SAT if you have ample time to do practice tests. You don’t necessarily need to have somebody to teach you the SAT to do well. You can simply use practice SAT tests and those are practically everywhere: online, library, career center, etc.</p>
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<p>Exactly why it should be more stringent on the numbers.</p>
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<p>I see, you’ve never heard of English 45 series.</p>
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<p>No, really? Of course, there are those who can’t afford to attend UC’s. But I am pretty certain that in cross-admit battles between Cal and community colleges, a vast majority end up going to Cal. That population constitutes such a small number of the transfer students. I am talking about your run of the mill slacker high school student who goes to a community college, pulls off a 3.8 and transfers to Cal without having to jump through the same hoops freshman admits have to.</p>
<p>I am gonna go ahead and argue that SAT is highly SELF-teachable. I have seen many people who paid big bucks for prep classes and still got worse scores than the self-taught students.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t think any college admission system favors the wealthy, especially since they ask for your parent information and background information (I remember the UC’s do; if they don’t then I stand corrected). Colleges automatically expect higher scores, gpa and whatnot if you’re from a wealthy family (your mom a professor in chemistry? no excuse for a 640 on chem SATII then). </p>
<p>Of course, if you got legacies and whatnot, that’s a different story.</p>
<p>Wait, are you sure these weren’t cases where one student was out of state, and another was not? And/or if they were applying to different colleges? I think Berkeley is actually much more predictable than private schools are, and the reason the private schools’ students are on average so much more similar in academic level is that they don’t require you to specify department or major or anything of that sort usually. For instance, everyone in MIT is around the same level, but I’d say an EECS major at Berkeley is probably a much higher achiever than a math major on average – exceptions made for the most involved students. </p>
<p>I’ve been able to explain pretty easily why certain students got “screwed” out of Berkeley. While I think many of these reasons were stupid, the fact that I’ve been able to explain them on average makes me happier than with private schools, where, while average academics are good, “good” generally isn’t really all that great, and very exceptional academic students I know often don’t make it…and the reason, I think these universities are frank about, is that they admit classes, not individuals. Which is fine with me, but I prefer Berkeley to remain more predictable.</p>
<p>So while the disparities in Berkeley are high, and I agree they’re kind of awkward, I can’t say it’s less predictable than private schools are. Then again, I was accepted to the EECS department, not L&S, and I know less about L&S…though I did transfer to it when I decided I wanted to be a mathematician. Can anyone else confirm that L&S is very random? I’d be very disappointed, as I said, to learn of this. But I was heavily surprised with some L&S decisions, now you mention it.</p>
<p>See, this is the thing, you say it isn’t, and I always had the impression it was, in fact so stringent on numbers that it could overlook other factors! </p>
<p>To give an example, the guy at my school who seemed the most qualified to succeed in EECS at Berkeley didn’t get in. Those who did get in had higher GPA’s because they took more AP courses or something, but weren’t really at all better at math or science.</p>
<p>Again this comes down to the fact I don’t know if L&S is different.</p>
<p>A large number of transfers, especially in the humanities, cannot take their prereqs at community college and most of them are required to just do the IGETC program.</p>
<p>As for English, I went on ASSIST.org and looked at the English transfer requirements from community colleges.
They still don’t get out of their major requirements that easily. Of the sample of CCs I looked at for English transfers, none of them had articulations for 45B-C. For a lot of them they just get out of breadth, R&C, etc.</p>
<p>Also I don’t think you can quite call English 45A,B,C weeder courses with 3.09, 3.33, and 3.32 average GPAs on pickaprof. CampusBuddy reports the English department average as 3.37.</p>
<p>With the exception of science, engineering and some social science majors, transfers mostly have to meet IGETC at CC and then focus their two years here on their major. As a result transfers don’t have (or don’t have as much assuming they do have free time other than their major courses) easy breadth courses to increase their UC GPAs.</p>
<p>Community college courses may be easy, but transfer students still need to be well above average at the CC to be able to get in.</p>
<p>This is an old article about the serious lack of diversity in college administration. While nearly 9% of the United States’ college student body is now Asian American and as much as 20% at the most selective schools, fewer than 1% of college presidents and less than 3% of deans are Asian American.</p>
<p>It sure looks like diversity doesn’t apply in this case.</p>
<p>^You know why, because our parents tells us to become doctors, engineers, and programmers etc… We are told to go only into fields just because they pay very well and very few of us have the testicular/ovarian fortitude to say no and do something that we really want to. And then there are also the group of us who will never take their heads out of their wallets and go into those same fields for the same reasons. </p>
<p>We overrun hospitals and technology companies. Very few of us go into academia or education. That 1% statistic is no one’s problem but our own.</p>
<p>Diversity does not apply because we Asians are not diverse in our career choices.</p>
<p>Also another thing to consider, we make up 42% of the UG population, but if you look at our graduate programs we only make up 17%.</p>
<p>Academia and education administration are different fields</p>
<p>In retrospect I did not make my point very clearly</p>
<p>Yes Asians are very present in academia (albeit the numbers of us who go to graduate school to get Ph.Ds and then enter academia relative to the number of us who have BAs/BSs is low)</p>
<p>However, in education administration (e.g. staff major advisers, principals, vice-principals, etc.) we are clearly lacking because very few Asians go into education.</p>
<p>“In terms of being a student there, the fact that Cal was almost half asian was definetly a turn off. Not that I don’t like asians (in fact, many of my friends are asian) but I would rather have a lot more diversity in a potential school.”</p>
<p>"I would also put a “cap” on Asians at Cal, if I’m one of the decision makers. There are just too many of them on campus gradually destroying the equilibrium of what’s supposed to be an excellent student body based on race and ethnic representations. But this is just my personal view.</p>
<p>I have an Asian blood, btw."</p>
<p>Replace Asian with Black in those statements and see how well they flow.</p>
<p>Well, to be honest with you, when I took the SATs way back…(never mind the year. hehe) there were only two parts. (I got 1,470/1,600. Was accepted at Duke, Columbia, UPenn, Rice, Bowdoin and several other elite colleges, but rejected at MIT and Berkeley – the only two schools that rejected me.) So, I honestly don’t have a clue what the contents of the SAT II or the SAT Subject tests are. They way I look at it though, there is nothing wrong with SAT Subject Tests. That’s my personal view though. The UC can use that in lieu of the entrance exams I was proposing. The whole idea of my proposal is to have a centralized admissions system for the UC. I also think the the UC admissions should not put too much weight on SATs scores. They shouldn’t be better indicators of college successes. Performing well academically in high school + excellent ECs would be much better indicators of college successes. This has been proven not just int he US, but all over the world.</p>
<p>Yeah this I agree with. One of the reasons I would like the standardized tests to be amped up (for instance, the AP exams) is so that a higher standard is forced on high school students by the teachers. It’s really quite easy to get a 5 on the AP Calculus exams, and people who’re pretty hopeless at calculus do it. Some SAT II’s are OK, but the math one definitely sucks.</p>
You do not go into education to become presidents/chancellors/deans in colleges.
UCB Chancellor - Robert Birgeneau, physics and materials science<br>
UCLA Chancellor - Gene Block , psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences
UCSD Chancellor - Marye Anne Fox, chemistry
UCD Chancellor - Larry Vanderhoef, biochemistry
UCI Chancellor - Michael Drake, ophthalmology
ok, see a pattern here?</p>
<p>The hardworking Asians will just get into other highly ranked schools. Those schools will gain with UCs loss. It is not like the State of California will be able to stop a group of people who are committed to academic excellence. Berkeley and UCLA’s reputation as stellar universities will eventually lose their footing in the “elite” school list after they lower their standards. </p>
<p>Students should really be looking at other schools for college entrance anyway. The financial cutbacks that are coming this way in California will have a direct impact on future quality of education.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if that would really happen. After all, the UCs are not saying it won’t accept talented Asian applicants. It’s just that, in order to create a good mix of races, the ballooning Asian population in the UCs must be neutralized. I’m in favor of that. I have Asian blood (my mom is half Asian, though I look more like Italian than Asian cause of my father’s) and I don’t want to be around an Asian dominated school. I guess it’s the same reason why a school like Howard University wouldn’t really be attractive for everyone. Howard is a good school. But it just lacks a good mix of races as well as intellectual and cultural diversity. If Berkeley would become like Howard, I would never even bother to apply there anymore. And I’m pretty sure so would be many other talented races. 25%-30% Asians at Berkeley is ideal for now. 40% is just too much! This has to be corrected real fast.</p>