Why is Berkeley ranked high?

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
21

<p>"The statistic is actually quite useful as it is highly indicative of the work ethic and intelligence of the entire studentbody at UCal Berkeley."</p>

<p>Let's be honest here-- the work ethic and intelligence of the entire student body at Cal is subpar when compared to Stanford and Caltech. This shows that class rank, in terms of how Berkeley is using it, is quite useless. While 99% of Cal's admits are in the top 10% of their graduating class, some to these students are not as competitive as their counterparts at Stanford and Caltech.</p>

22

<p>I went to an extremely competitive and highly renowned private school that did not rank students. How does Cal account for that?</p>

<p>Certainly my school is not the only in the entire country that realizes ranking students drives them to take the easiest classes possible for the highest grades. </p>

<p>What a stupid world we live in - as if one person's education could or should be compared to another.</p>

23

<p>
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Private schools heavily emphasize the academic abilities of a student while UCLA and Cal are willing to look beyond them. I think it's unfortunate that UCLA and Cal do this. Applicants should be admitted solely based on their merits and not their backgrounds.

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<p>I think you're confused. Berkeley and UCLA will look at the academic abilities of the student in his/her context. That's a perfect reason to look past them.</p>

<p>Great example: I met a girl recently admitted who had a 1700 on the SAT (and she had a good GPA). She is a low-income student, but more than that, she had internships and classes for business, leadership conferences, speeches, etc. She was admitted to Cal, despite her "low SAT score."</p>

<p>Stanford and co, while evaluating students holistically, do practice AA actively. Isn't that non-merit based?</p>

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This is a useless statistic. The difference in difficulty between high schools varies widely.

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<p>Honestly, people keep arguing that X statistic and Y statistic are useless when they have no idea why. The differences in statistics may not be for reasons so obvious to you--"the difference in difficulty varying widely"--but it very well could be other things: legacy preferences, AA, etc.</p>

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If you say top 10% in the state, the statistics might be believable

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<p>Consider that Berkeley only accepts about half of the students in the top 4%. I wouldn't be surprised if such were true.</p>

<p>(Not to mention that the University of California is designated for the top 12.5% of schools, so being in the top 10% of the state wouldn't be too difficult for Berkeley.)</p>

<p>
[quote]
the work ethic and intelligence of the entire student body at Cal is subpar when compared to Stanford and Caltech. This shows that class rank, in terms of how Berkeley is using it, is quite useless.

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<p>Bit of a leap in logic, no?</p>

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I went to an extremely competitive and highly renowned private school that did not rank students. How does Cal account for that?

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<p>It doesn't. It doesn't even consider rank (see their common data set if you doubt me). It looks at your a) grades, and b) rigor of course load, and that's how they end up with 99% in the top 10%.</p>

24

<p>
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Let's be honest here-- the work ethic and intelligence of the entire student body at Cal is subpar when compared to Stanford and Caltech.

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<p>I agree with this. Although I want to add that I think Stanford's students are far more run-of-the-mill (and more similar to us) than Cal-tech's. I think that the big tech schools like MIT and Caltech have students with oftentimes "prodigal" intelligence rather than just "above average intelligence." This is probably partly due to the admissions criteria and how tech schools naturally stress prestigious achievements in the sciences whereas the big universities look for more well-roundedness and use more holistic admissions, often at the sacrifice of "genius."</p>

25

<p>So your daddy makes a huge donation to some private school. And behold, junior gets admitted with good grades, but not the best grade. So is the rich junior more deserving than the low income student (often with better grades) who applies and gets rejected to make room for Junior?</p>

<p>The answer is "Yes" for the private schools!</p>

26

<p>@ev700</p>

<p>That sort of thing happens in the minority of cases. Believe me, you need to be incredibly rich and wealthy in order to make a school accept you.</p>

<p>Maybe 10 students at each top private are admitted this way. Probably even less.</p>

27

<p>
[quote]
So your daddy makes a huge donation to some private school. And behold, junior gets admitted with good grades, but not the best grade. So is the rich junior more deserving than the low income student (often with better grades) who applies and gets rejected to make room for Junior?</p>

<p>The answer is "Yes" for the private schools!

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<p>The more common fact is that people are given advantages throughout their lives that enable them to put together an application more likely to gain them admission at top schools. But these days the people have to be pretty damn good, in any case, to get into a top school.</p>

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<p>Not just damn good, but damn lucky. It must be terribly difficult to pick one applicant from another when the admission rate is <10% for some of the private universities.</p>

29

<p>
[quote]
So your daddy makes a huge donation to some private school. And behold, junior gets admitted with good grades, but not the best grade. So is the rich junior more deserving than the low income student (often with better grades) who applies and gets rejected to make room for Junior?</p>

<p>The answer is "Yes" for the private schools!

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<p>Let me give you a counterexample. You're a rather mediocre student in high school - in fact, not even close to being in the top 10% of your high school class. Nevertheless, you can catch a ball really well, so Cal admits you. While at Cal, not only do you do poorly in your classes, but you also find a prof who is willing to grant you academic credit for a class that you never even took so you can avoid being in bad academic standing. Nevertheless, you eventually end up having to leave Cal for a community college.</p>

<p>Lest you think I'm making this up, this is the story of Mike Ainsworth and Ronnie Davenport, 2 of Cal's former wide receivers.</p>

30

<p>"Every undergraduate student graduated in the top 10% of his or her high school class (only 88% at CalTech & 89% at Stanford & 83% at Swarthmore & 86% at Amherst)"</p>

<p>Tastybeef is right that this is a useless statistic. The fact that CalTech and Stanford 'only' have ~85% of their students in the top 10% of their HS class, compared to Cal's 99%, proves that class rank is rather trivial in evaluating top schools. Why? Because both Stanford and CalTech are inarguably better schools than Cal, irregardless of the average "class rank."</p>

31

<p>
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Because both Stanford and CalTech are inarguably better schools than Cal, irregardless of the average "class rank."

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You mean Stanford's and Caltech's undergraduate students are "inarguably" better. There's more to a school than just the undergrad students...faculty, grad students and facilities are also part of the equation.</p>

32

<p>Because Berkeley has two names: Berkeley and Cal.</p>

33

<p>
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irregardless of the average "class rank."

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<p>lol.......</p>

34

<p>Berkeley is as good as it gets. Despite what USNEWS will tell you, it's easily one of the top 10-15 universities in the world.</p>

35

<p>...because they fire off a cannon and drop people over the edge of the stadium at football games, instilling a "survival of the fittest" attitude</p>

36

<p>As a student in the college of engineering, I find the faculty to be extremely accessible and friendly (most of them). They remember our names!! That was never the case in lower division courses..</p>

37

<p>What makes it better than other top publics, say Michigan, UCLA, UVA?</p>

38

<p>Distinction of faculty. Great football team (well, much much better than it had been). You'll meet plenty of smart students, and may make a few enemies along the way.. </p>

<p>UCB > UCLA ;)</p>

39

<p>And on the "superficial" side, Berkeley probably has better name recognition and prestige than the other top publics... regardless of whether its because of its grad school or not.</p>

40

<p>If you're talking about undergraduate ranks, Berkeley is definately in the Top 10... Let's not fall into USNEWS trap, which includes difficulty of acceptance and all these other non-academic ratings.</p>

<p>With Haas (which ranks 2nd or 3rd even for undergrad) and top 3 engineering program, it easily makes the top 10.</p>

<p>Here's a breakdown of Shanghai Jiao Tong University's ratings, which are based soley on academics, research, faculty, etc. And this isn't just some random rating... Berkeley is ranked 4th btw...</p>

<p>I chose the one off of Duke's website because it breaks it down by state and has some pretty good comments.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.duke.edu/%7Emyhan/feng.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.duke.edu/~myhan/feng.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Yes, I agree many of the students at Cal are not very intelligent, but that is true for every university (I'm sure the percentages are the same, but there will be more at UCB simply because there are so many undergraduates). Some of my friends this year got into ivy leagues / privates even though they are not nearly as intelligent as those that were rejected.</p>