Remove the EE 16B requirement for CS majors at UC Berkeley

The Issue

There has been so much negativity surrounding EE16B for a while now, and in light of the EECS funding crisis, I think it’s a good time for us to finally bring this course to attention and petition for the removal of this absurd requirement for CS majors. To start off, the EE16B course is widely known to be very poorly organized and taught, and a majority of the course content have absolutely no relevancy for most CS majors. Students from every single semester have complained endlessly about how much valuable time they wasted from their lives learning materials they won’t ever use again in their careers, as well as the detrimental effects it has had on their mental and physical health. Seriously, it is quite outrageous that a requirement like this still exists in our department.

In addition, EE16B is apparently a well-funded class that takes away a large amount of resources and budget from the department, causing many of the upper division CS courses to be stripped of funding and seats. This means that not everyone can successfully enroll into the upper division courses that they wanted to take, and those who do enroll into these courses won’t receive nearly as much resources as they need. Many of the courses they used to offer in the past are gone because of this, and the most important courses (CS170, CS189, CS186, CS162, CS161) are becoming increasingly difficult to enroll into due to reduced seats. More recently, there has also been issues surrounding the restricted enrollment for CS70 as part of the department’s solution to cut costs. This is simply ridiculous, and the root of all these problems is funding, so why can’t we just remove the pointless EE16B requirement to free up much needed funding?

Despite taking away an enormous amount of funding from the department, the EE16B course itself still struggles to expand its seats to accommodate for all students who need this requirement to graduate, which is quite a joke. Every semester, the department warns students to enroll into EE16B as early as they can since there won’t be any guarantees that juniors and seniors would be able to make it into the class. There have been instances every year where 2nd semester CS seniors cannot enroll into EE16B, and thus have trouble graduating on time, jeopardizing the full-time job offers that they have already accepted. If enrollment is still such a huge problem for EE16B, then why can’t the department just remove this graduation requirement altogether for CS majors to free up seats and funding? They really are contradicting themselves whenever they mention that funding is an issue while still requiring everyone to take this useless course in order to graduate.

This issue is even more bizarre when you realize that CS majors admitted to Cal before fall 2017 don’t even need to take EE16B in order to graduate. Instead, they have the option to take EE16A + Math 54 to fulfill the requirement, as opposed to EE16A/Math 54 + EE16B. This further reveals the lack of necessity to enforce EE16B as a graduation requirement for all CS majors.

As a preliminary proposal to remove the EE16B requirement, we can have the following choices for CS majors:

- Take an upper division technical elective instead of EE16B

- Recall the option of taking EE16A + Math 54 to fulfill the requirement

- Take Math 110 instead of EE16B

- Literally any 4-unit course in the school instead of EE16B

Of course, these options don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and they each offer much more value to CS majors while saving valuable time in comparison to the EE16B requirement. Feel free to add any ideas to the above as well.

If the college doesn’t respond effectively to our petition, we will be hosting organized protests on campus to ensure that our voices are heard. Whatever it takes, let’s remove the EE16B requirement.

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/ro3hhk/remove_ee16b_requirement/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/tjn8xq/dumb_solution_but_cut_eecs16b_funding_and_put_it/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/r9o3eu/respectfully_fuck_eecs_16b/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/nbh4fj/petition_to_get_rid_of_eecs_16b/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/rmto22/my_problem_with_16b/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/qhcjye/i_hate_16b/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/t75en1/ee16b_is_terrible/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/q74yu6/why_does_eecs16b_have_such_low_hkn_ratings/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/rielwp/to_all_those_currently_pulling_allnighters_for_16b/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/ra0jeh/if_they_dont_get_rid_of_16b_before_i_graduate_i/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/qoeq7n/funding_solution_to_eecs/

https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/nbsqhx/ee16b_killed_me/