Comment by jogjayr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jogjayr | Hacker News Reader

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Unlike in American colleges, students in India apply to both a college and a major at that college. So competition for desirable majors in the top schools is cutthroat. If you don't get enough marks you don't get to study that major at that college - either go to a different college or (in the case of really high reputation institutes like the IITs) study something else at that college.

Generally you can't change your major without changing your college and starting over (or at least from year 2) so it's almost never done. I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone explained the Russian system and it sounds similar to what we have in India:

"Majors/minors. It's such a big deal in a lot of fiction, for example. But even though I read about it a lot of times, I still don't quite get it, along with class selection. In Russia, you choose a specialization when you enroll (e.g. Applied Math), and from the day one to the end, all students in your group will attend the same classes and take the same tests and exams. American system seems like a computer game's research tree to me - "you must unlock A, B and C before studying D", and somehow, it's your burden to keep track of what classes you attended and got grades in. WTF. Here, you just get a ready-made complete curriculum, no need to do anything but study. If you feel you chose a wrong specialization in the beginning, you might change it, and then things become a bit complicated, but it only happens rarely, and usually only right after the first semester." [1]

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8qrh78/nonameric...

There are similar elements in how the electrical engineering computer science and letters & science computer science programs at UC Berkeley admitted people in the early 2000's.

L&SCS admitted you to the university and department, but you didn't get officially into the major until after 2 years of taking prerequisites. Admission to the CS major was very competitive, and yet if you didn't get high enough grades to beat the curve, you didn't get into the major and had 2 years of CS prereqs. Choosing another major at that point required either studying in uni for longer or graduating in a "normal" time while studying something from a very limited set of options.

EECS had a much more competitive acceptance curve. If you were accepted into the department, your position in the major was secured. If you didn't get into the department, you also didn't get into Berkeley.

My closest friends applied to L&S CS, while I applied to EECS. I didn't get into Berkeley, while my friends didn't make it through the meat grinder prerequisite years.

Looking back, I'm happy with my own decision to try to study what I wanted without compromise. It was definitely a blow to my ego at the time, but when I heard about how overcrowded the L&S classrooms were, I honestly think I got a better education experience at a smaller, less prestigious UC. my friends routinely told me about massive overcrowded lecture halls. If they got to class late, all seats might be taken and they had to go home and watch the lecture online. Oh and none of my Berkeley friends made it through the prerequisite grinder, either.

I don't know how the system is now, but if my nephews or nieces were considering that path, I'd look into it and make sure they were informed of how the experience was as a student. In my opinion, it was less about learning and more about proving yourself all the way through. The quality of education still seems objectively lower to me, looking back.

It's very similar in Spain (and I imagine many other European countries). Your grade (a single number representing a combination of high school grades and standard university admission exam results) determines which major you can study at which university. In fact the cut-off score between majors varies much more than between universities.

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