DECEMBER 11, 2015

Updated: FEBRUARY 12, 2017

At UC Berkeley, hypotheses about the departments with the lowest grades abound.

To see if those perceptions reflect reality, The Daily Californian analyzed more than 1.5 million grades given over the last nine years and reported through Cal Answers, a repository for campus data. We limited our analysis to undergraduate courses, considering only the departments that have issued more than 1,000 letter grades. These figures reflect grades awarded in classes offered by a particular department, not the GPA of students in a particular major.

Grading policies vary between departments and grade averages don't necessarily measure the difficulty of a department's courses. Still, we found a significant gap — more than one letter grade — between the departments with the highest and lowest averages.

Before seeing the results, we'd like you to guess which department has had the lowest grade average.