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Comment by josephpmay | Hacker News Reader

I am currently applying to college, and reading this is making me think twice about applying to Berkeley. Is the UC budget crisis really that bad? Are situations like this common?

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This isn't about the budget; this is about not having enough TA's to assist with the class as well as the class possibly being "too easy" the last iteration. Berkeley holds each CS course to within a range of average GPAs: If a class deviates from this range, it's deemed abnormal and the administration takes account to correct it. Speculation has it that this class was previously on the high end of the GPA range, and thus was made more "difficult".

Current UC Berkeley EECS senior: I would apply to Berkeley but suggest you go to a better funded smaller school so long as its top ~15 if possible. Me, I had the choice between Berkeley, Illinois, and Carnegie Mellon. I do wish I had gone to Carnegie Mellon. The only two things that Berkeley really has going for it at this point is: it's close to tech companies (so tons of recruiters) and the degree still has a prestigious ring to it. Classes are packed even in upper division CS courses; I'm still waitlisted for 3 classes and have no idea which ones I'll get into. And it's only going to get worse as more people flock to CS and as the budget tightens.

I'm a CS sophomore at Berkeley, and I actually had the same choice. Sure, it would have been better to go to CMU based solely on the school, but the difference in tuition and fees between the two was too great to not go to Berkeley. (I'm in-state and received little financial aid.)

Ooh yeah I forgot about this point. If I were in state I wouldn't mind as much.

this is highly atypical.

here are the syllabi for two other similar classes at Cal: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/sp12/information.html http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee122/fa12/grading.html

here are syllabi for the the first two intro cs classes: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa13/about.html (this class has 1000 people in it) http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/fa13/handout0.pdf

I have heard (second hand, but from people who work directly with Berkeley staff) that least in physics their issues are this severe. Required courses are being made biannual and filling completely so that students with bad luck lose even the option of a four year degree.

I was at berkeley for physics and computer science, and while some physics classes had problems with the number of students enrolling, they were nowhere near as bad as the CS classes. It's well known at Cal that there's way too many incoming CS major. They recently started capping the major to people above a certain GPA, but apparently that isn't enough.

That new policy won't take effect until 2 years from now, unfortunately. Hopefully it will serve its purpose.

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