[0xDEAFBEAD]

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA.

As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor devalued if Cal went the direction of e.g. Yale and started handing out 79% A's and A-minuses: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/professors-face-grading-d...

[JonChesterfield]

It won't last. You need a good grade to find work after so handing out lower grades decreases applications next year.

On the plus side, high grade + long ago remains a signal.

[sfink]

I doubt that's the bottleneck. UCB's acceptance rate is not high (<5% for CS). They have way more people who want to get in -- qualified kids, too! -- than they can fit. They'd need to burn through that backlog before it started showing up as a signal.

[perpetualpatzer]

> high grade + long ago remains a signal

Does it? I didn't think people looked at GPAs once you're 5 or so years into a career.

[lokar]

I read the subreddit for the UC I went to. When acceptance letters went out this year there were (as you expect) a ton of questions from accepted students. About 1/3 to 1/2 included questions about how bad "grad deflation" was, asking for comparisons to other campuses.

[kenjackson]

Unfortunately grade deflation has little positive impact for the students. Medical and law schools often (typically) don't take grade inflation/deflation from a school into account. And almost no scholarships take this into account. If you do have professional school aspirations, there's very little benefit to being at a school with grade deflation.

[OkayPhysicist]

The university I went to basically eliminated "B"s for pre-med and pre-law students, which made most courses effectively pass-fail: If you get an A, you move on, if you get a "C", you're encouraged to find a different career path. IMO, it's a reasonable response to an unreasonable system.

Likewise, they had a system where disciplinary records could be appealed at any time while you were at school, but they only held evidence for a year. So if you get caught drinking underage as a Sophomore, you could appeal as a Senior, argue that since there's no evidence that you committed the act it should be removed from your record, and win. Like the obfuscated pass-fail system, this was basically only for the students trying to get into Med/Law school, and IMO was a kind of underhanded way to working around an unreasonable standard.

[lokar]

Probably, until it happens everywhere.

My main point was that, at least in their perception, this is something happening at many/most UC campuses

[sndgndgndgndy]

Unpopular opinion: turning public universities into an academic hunger games is diametrically opposed to their purpose for existing, which is to create an educated populace. Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams, is not improving educational outcomes for anyone. People who complain about "grade inflation" have completely lost sight of why public education exists in the first place.

[typs]

Obviously a balance would be best, but as someone who went to a very grade-inflated school, I do believe that grade inflation gets in the way of education substantially. When you can get through classes with very little effort and understanding and know you will get a sufficient grade, many people will simply not learn the material deeply.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

The material outcome is what should be the goal. Tests are a relatively brute way to try and determine how well the student understands the material, but conversations about grade inflation and "back in my day getting a grade was hard", and professors purposefully putting difficult questions (not in content but in presentation of the question) all betray the inherent goal being pursued.

Its all Goodhart's law problem, but we are missing the forest for the trees talking about grades and tests when what we want is people to be educated, and critical thinkers and competent in their area and due to a comprehensive way to evaluate that we end up talking about grade inflation or how Yale vs Berkeley gives letters at the end of a semester

[FuckButtons]

Some of the exams in Berkeley were brutal, but they never felt like trick questions, they did on occasion require a level of mastery of the material which was extreme, but it never felt like someone was just trying to make the questions obtuse for the sake of it.

[intended]

This is valid, and I would add that these academic hunger games are a result of College Degrees being needed to get what remains of well paying jobs.

Maybe we can use AI to create new exams that grade people on professional capability, and then gate entry into other professional degrees?

Hmm, Where would the teachers come from, and how good would the education actually be?

[zipy124]

Except this is exactly the opposite of turning it into the hunger games. That would be a situation where failure is kept artificially high by high-grading/curve. This is not that.

No one is intentionally lowering the quality of instruction or trying to trip students up. They are trying to get them to pass the same bar that generations of students before them passed fine...

[0xDEAFBEAD]

There are 10 different public universities in the UC system and 23 in the CSU system. The majority of them are not difficult to graduate. If you don't want a demanding education, don't go to a demanding university.

>Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams

I was happy with the quality of the instruction, and I didn't feel I was being "tripped up" on exams.

It's not about "hunger games", it's about challenging students to learn a lot of material and learn it well. Again, if that's not what you want, just don't attend.

The number of places where this environment exists is getting smaller every year: https://xcancel.com/CJHandmer/status/2060144837157118307#m

I'm glad the professors at Cal are working to preserve it there.

[welshwelsh]

Even more unpopular opinion: universities don't exist to create an educated populace. People don't need universities to learn, they can read textbooks on their own.

Universities exist as gatekeepers and credentialing bodies. Their purpose is to certify that a person has studied some topic in depth and is an expert in it. They promote education indirectly, by giving people an incentive to study.

A good university is one where anyone with a degree is guaranteed to be highly knowledgeable in their field of study. This makes it easier for anyone who might want to employ or do research with graduates, as there is no need to test their knowledge.

By this metric, universities have failed spectacularly. This is particularly obvious in computer science. Employers routinely ask CS graduates to solve data structure/algorithm problems in interviews, because a degree is not enough to prove that somebody knows this stuff.

[OkayPhysicist]

People can read textbooks on their own, but how many actually do? Even among the subset of the population that does have the drive to educate themselves, most will end up focusing on the immediately applicable, or at least immediately engaging.

You see this with Physics all the time. Even the people who are sufficiently motivated to try and teach themselves tend to neglect foundational knowledge (especially mathematics, but even stuff like Mechanics and E&M), try to jump into the advanced material (Quantum Quantum Strings Quantum Black Holes Quantum), and then fall into two camps: They either complain about how Physics using too much "jargon", or they read a bunch of "qualitative" pop-sci descriptions of the topic and then think they have an understanding of it.

At least with software, you can get pretty far just learning whatever tool is immediately useful to you, but fully self-taught developers still often end up with random holes in their knowledge.