<p>Exactly what about my post do you find bewildering? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Have I done any such thing? Any ‘blasting’, if that is indeed the right word, was directed at those students who, frankly, aren’t particularly strong and are consigned to GPA’s below 2.5, and would therefore have been better off at another school. Yet I don’t think that’s a ‘blasting’ in the least, as I think even most of those students would probably agree that Berkeley was not the right school for them. Let’s be perfectly honest. Nobody enjoys earning less than a 2.5. To be earning less than a 2.5 and, especially, to be consigned to academic probation, is to be enduring a painful and miserable existence. Nobody is enjoying the experience - not the student, not Cal, not anybody. It would have been better off for everybody involved - especially the student - if he had simply not been admitted. {As I have always said, schools should simply not admit those students who they know or can reasonably predict are going to perform poorly.}</p>
<p>I think it’s also important to consider why some students get < 2.5s. Is it financial reasons e.g. they need to work full-time during the school year? I can see how that’d hurt one’s grades.</p>
<p>Or is it because they don’t do their work and prepare for exams? I find it a little hard to believe that someone who goes to every lecture, actively asks GSIs for help during discussion or OH, and completes all the HW (and checks against the solutions later) will fail, barring those classes with professors who give out more Ds than As. But for something like the physics 7 series, as long as you work thoroughly (not necessarily smartly), you’ll get at least a B, if not an A.</p>
<p>So I think a lot of it comes down to work ethic and how well students want to teach themselves. In some ways I think it’s harder to get a D than it is to get a B.</p>
<p>bsd, how many students do you know that do that? Particularly, if someone is working full-time due to financial hardships, do you think they’d have the time to go to OH or even go to every lecture? Perhaps those with <2.5 GPA should be following those actions, but they may not necessarily have the time or motivation to, which is why they have <2.5 in the first place.</p>
<p>When I said “very strong” I did in fact mean “some of the very best.” I think there’s no problem with there being decent to very strong students here, where decent of course means students who actually do well for themselves here and don’t get hurt by the school. </p>
<p>Also, there are plenty of the very best students coming here already – just a fair share of less brilliant ones. When I look at the PhD program here in math, I see a fair share of internationals, Berkeley students, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Duke, and even some lesser known schools, none in severe disproportion to the others. Which really goes to say that many of the very best academic minds end up all over the place because the selectivity of top schools in today’s day is not about admitting the best students, it is about admitting the best fit for their school motto and goals for their class.</p>
<p>I’m highly against an increase in selectivity at Berkeley unto the top private level until we actually figure out a way to do it properly – the PhD program has access to some of the best tools in determining good candidates, whereas this simply isn’t the case in undergrad admissions.</p>
<p>I do, however, as always endorse what you’re ultimately saying, which is that we need to figure out how not to admit the students who would simply be better off elsewhere, of which there is certainly no dearth of examples.</p>
<p>I totally agree. Now, the issue is: why might this unfortunate turn of events be happening and repeating itself over and over? The reason to me is that Berkeley’s admissions system has the principle flaw of a big state school policy, namely of looking at numbers mainly, and then signing the individuals off. The issue is that from many high schools, good numbers simply need not mean being able to have a good experience at Berkeley, and the issue again becomes that numbers for a high school need to be normalized against its difficulty, as measured by standardized exams like the AP’s. Since our data aren’t so useful, we pretty much do the state school thing and admit a ton of people, some of which are great, others of which aren’t suited to the school.</p>
I don’t know anyone who needs to do that maybe because I can’t point out anyone with a 2.5.
I also said I understand that students with time-consuming jobs are more pressed for time and have to juggle more. My post was mainly about (hypothetical) students who don’t have these obligations. Maybe they don’t exist. I just don’t think the problem is solely due to weeders.</p>
<p>For those students who truly need to work full-time during the school year, they should be provided with better financial aid. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Then if that is true, there is even less reason for students to be earning 2.5 or less, especially in courses that are far less difficult than Physics 7. Yet I think we all know students who do earn such grades. </p>
<p>Besides, let’s be honest - how many students who are doing poorly will actually attend OH? Perhaps they should, but I think we know that most won’t, for they’re simply too embarrassed. If you don’t know what’s going on, you’re probably not going to want to ask questions that only serve to highlight the fact that you don’t understand what’s going on - particularly if office hours are filled with numerous students who are actually asking intelligent questions. </p>
<p>At least from the experience of me and my colleagues, office hours tend to be predominantly used by students who already have an excellent understanding of the material and are looking to ensure they get a top grade (which they probably would have earned anyway) and/or are trying to understand material beyond the course, perhaps because they’re interested in graduate study. Most poorly-performing students will understandably not want to display their lack of understanding in the face of such gunners. </p>
<p>Again, that’s why those students would have frankly been better off at a lesser school that is more aligned with their talents. Whether they’re performing poorly because of a lack of talent or work ethic, or simply because they’re working full-time and hence don’t have the time to study, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are performing poorly relative to Berkeley standards and hence would have been better off at another school.</p>
<p>But given the fundamental decision to curve classes and force some percentage of students to C, D and failing grades, regardless of the absolute level of knowledge or performance they deliver, if you remove the bottom level students, those who now get Bs and As might themselves become the bottom 40% of the class. </p>
<p>In other words, there will always be those with 2.5s because of the grading philosophy - make Cal more selective and those GPAs will be earned by increasingly smarter and more qualified students than those currently suffering, but one way or another the same percentage will earn sh**y grades.</p>
<p>And obviously the accompanying reform would be to lighten the curves. The rationale - as twisted as it may be - for the harshness of the current curves is that many students are simply unworthy. Whether you agree with that rationale or not, that is indeed the rationale that the faculty invokes. Take away the poorly performing students and you eliminate that rationale. </p>
<p>Take MIT as an example. I think nobody would seriously dispute that MIT is one of the most difficult schools in the world, and certainly their grade curves are not soft by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, the majority of MIT students are engineers - which is arguably the most difficult suite of majors at any school - compared to about only 20% of Berkeley students. Even the non-engineering MIT students still major in something difficult, as while some majors are easier than others, MIT has no true ‘creampuff’ majors, but, let’s face it, Berkeley does. Despite it all, MIT nevertheless manages to graduate a higher percentage of its students than Berkeley does. {Granted, I don’t know about the proportion of MIT students with barely passing GPA’s).</p>
<p>To those who would rebut that Berkeley’s lower graduation rate may be attributed to students having to work full-time, I would repeat that that’s why Berkeley should offer better financial aid to those students, which Berkeley could offer if they simply stopped admitting so many poorly performing students (some of whom would presumably consume financial aid). </p>
<p>To reiterate, I don’t say any of this out of malice. Everybody loses when Berkeley admits poorly performing students, especially those students. They would have been better off at another school that is more suited to their talents.</p>
<p>Sakky has a great message, and I think a great addition to it would be that we need significantly better data to admit students with as a staple. For instance, we need to normalize against some pretty significant measure.</p>
<p>While we’re being honest, let’s also admit that some students simply aren’t motivated, or chose the wrong major, or have a terrible work ethic, or issues outside of school. Some of these students would not graduate even at UCSD, or UC Merced, or a Cal State.</p>
<p>I’d also like to mention that the 6-year graduation rate has been rising slowly but steadily every year and is now pretty close to MIT’s graduation rate.</p>
<p>Besides, MIT has a higher graduation rate largely because its students are more motivated, because MIT is more selective. Is this something Berkeley should aim for? To be more selective? How much more selective? 10%? Maybe. 20%? 30%? Is that worth the risk of not admitting certain students who would have done well at Berkeley? I know you’ve proposed methods like statistical mining before, but we know it’s not perfect and it would be slow to react to changes (for example, one high school revamps its teachers/curriculums but it will take years for the uptake in quality to show up). </p>
<p>Also, while there are many students who would have done better at another school than earn a 2.1 at Berkeley, there are also many students who have done perfectly fine by barely graduating Berkeley with a 2.0-2.5. We have to consider: would a student who got a 2.0-2.5 at Berkeley get a 3.5-4.0 at UC Merced? Probably not. In fact, he is almost certainly better off graduating Berkeley with a 2.0-2.5 than graduating UC Merced with a 2.0-2.5. Furthermore, it depends on the student. If you’re trying to get into a good graduate program, yes Berkeley’s harsh grading can ruin you. But if you’re just trying to get a degree and looking to go into the workforce, I’m not sure that those students who are barely graduating are going to be much worse off than had they attended another college.</p>
<p>What I would like to see is a more consistent grade inflation across all majors, not just certain majors, and a higher graduation rate. This does not have to come at the cost of being more selective.</p>
<p>I think we need to be more specific which subsets of the 2.0-2.5’s we’re talking about. If we’re talking about those earning such GPAs in the “harder” majors, then perhaps the real fix is being flexible with change of major options.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And even so, mainly for professional schools. Plenty of graduate programs value research experience so ridiculously more that a lower Berkeley or MIT or whatever GPA does not matter (to the point where one can make the topmost programs with far from an amazingly perfect GPA). </p>
<p>I really think the issue with overadmitting is not so much that bad students suffer (there are plenty of classes that one simply CANNOT fail), but that the average student experiences the issues accompanying overcrowding. Certainly though, as you say, I think currently we don’t have the infrastructure to be more selective without simply being more random, and that’s certainly not achieving any purpose but to make people mad – definitely not admitting the best students either.</p>
<p>Harsh grading is certainly a bit of a joke, I agree. If it were uniform, that’s a different story, but getting a good GPA is truly about gaming the system, even in the hardest majors. Harsh grading gets people to stress more, and not necessarily learn more, and it certainly doesn’t help with any admissions process.</p>
<p>Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve been on CC… nice to see veterans like sakky and vicissitudes still here.</p>
<p>While I agree that making Berkeley semi-privatized would help with the current issue of budget cuts, I think cutting down on the number of students is a worrying proposition. I think one of the best things about Cal is its ability to admit absolutely top-notch students who didn’t go through the rat-race of volunteering, clubs, leadership, and other extracurriculars that they would need to do in order to get into a top-tier private school. While the stereotype is to label them as bookworms with no social life, my experience is that they have their own set of interests outside of school which may not necessarily be able to be put on a college app. That being said, once they get to college some switch turns on for them and they find the motivation to do really well by any measure. For these students, as well as transfer students (for whom it’s even more difficult to get into a top private school), Cal represents the only place they can get the excellent education that matches their potential. </p>
<p>So what happens if Cal tightens its standards and these students slip through the cracks? I think Cal loses those top-tier potential students and instead keeps those students who, honestly, went through the “rat race” but weren’t smart or talented enough to go to a more selective school. Yes, you might get rid of some students who would do poorly at Berkeley. I think, however, the cost of losing the gems (those students whose potential isn’t shown on their app) is too great.</p>
<p>^^ EXACTLY my message too. A huge number of Cal students are bright people who thought padding their resumes excessively is a bore, and not worth the crapshoot at several private schools. A smaller part of these are truly top notch and headed for wonderful things. </p>
<p>We need to have adequate means to increase selectivity if we do it.</p>
<p>Agreed. However flawed they may be, I think test scores (especially APs and SAT IIs) predict future performance as well as anything on a college app can. There are still plenty of exceptions to this, though.</p>
<p>The notion that poorly performing students plague the undergraduate population here at Cal is not a factor to be considered in the context of individual student talent, but rather than the system here in Berkeley is a meat grinder for everybody. Jam-packed lecture halls, dilemmas on selecting fewer available courses and capped majors, financial aid shortcomings, overcrowded residential halls, and oh yeah, a somewhat ambitious student body make this university overwhelming for those not able to cope with the intellectual and social pressures that this place presents. I would prefer Cal to be more selective for its undergraduate population simply because the infrastructure of the University has become strained to tenuous levels in trying to serve the needs of the undergraduates. State budget cuts have certainly made this factor more prominent in recent years.</p>
<p>If we want to motivate undergraduate performance, we need to need to present to them a University infrastructure that better addresses their needs as students - more aid, easier course and major selection, less crowded lecture halls, and better housing options (when I was a first year in 2006, a rather roomy corner triple in Unit 3 Norton Hall was $9,999 for the year, now it’s $11,600). Student fees in 2006 were $3800 a semester now are $5500. </p>
<p>Good thing I am a now senior that completed my undergraduate requirements a year ago, otherwise I would not be able to sustain the job I have on campus that I need to completely pay for my housing and student fees.</p>