<p>I've heard of the weeder courses in math (math 1b), MCB, chemistry, and many other science majors (and even business), but I haven't heard of any weeder course in CS yet despite the fact that I've heard of many people dropping out of their pursuit for a CS degree.</p>
<p>For current Berkeley students, which courses would you consider weeder courses in CS and why? </p>
<p>What did you think about CS 61A, B, C, CS 70, and EECS 42.</p>
<p>As a side question, what CS classes did you enjoy the most?</p>
<p>I’d say that CS 61A and CS 70 are weeder courses, with EE 40 as a weeder for EECS only.</p>
<p>CS 61A pushes your boundaries on what you consider programming and gets you to see programming as this abstract concept instead of something ingrained in the peculiarities of a particular language. Some people never comprehend that, so they find CS 61A incredibly difficult. In fact, for those people who just need to understand programming, there’s E7, which aims to accomplish the same goal in an easier, less-intense manner.</p>
<p>CS 70 does more-or-less the same thing, but it’s now applied to logic and algorithms rather than just progamming in general.</p>
<p>EE 40 is a weeder for EECS because it goes into depth about circuit design and reveals the EE side of things in a way similar to CS 61A for the CS side of things. However, based on what I’ve heard about EE 42, it’s not a weeder for CS because it’s probably one of the only electronics course you’d take for the program.</p>
<p>Are the classes unnecessarily extremely difficult to “weed” people out or is it just the material that’s extremely difficult to grasp?</p>
<p>In all cases, the material is simply difficult to grasp, but the courses are laid out that way so that they function as weeders.</p>
<p>That is, it’s definitely possible to redistribute the material so that there’d be no weeder courses, but then, there’d be people finding out by their senior year that they want to switch majors. That’s a very bad situation, hence the layout of the courses.</p>
<p>It’s usually expected that over 30% of the classes will drop after the first two weeks.</p>