anonucbstudent

Can you explain how being completely intolerant of the fact that students have lives helps with your resource constraints? People will be a couple minutes late. Things happen. I don't think it's reasonable to threaten kicking someone out of the class and failing them for being late once.

Again, if you want to say that you need to make the class as terrible as possible so that people drop, then just say so.

This is quite a disingenuous explanation for the syllabus. Several of the aspects contained in the syllabus have nothing to do with a GSI shortage -- in fact, one of them (the daily quizzes adds work for the GSIs to deal with.

There's no reason to punish the undergraduate students for the failings of the department. Things like denying bathroom breaks don't do anything to help out your resource shortage, unless you're basically saying that the only way to have enough resources is to make the class so unpleasant that no one wants to take it. Still, this is completely unfair to those students that actually end up taking the class. If that is the case, I can at least understand it -- however, you should explicitly say so

If you've taken a particularly extreme approach to "wake the department up," you should just come out and say so, rather than claiming that this policy is the only way to deal with it.

A somewhat related thought:

I'm not sure what the reason for the lack of TAs is, but I do know that some of the security professors are spending their time on things other than Berkeley activities (i.e. startups, etc.). I have no idea if you're involved with this yourself, but perhaps you guys need to figure out how to get your faculty to be able to support more graduate students rather than spending your time coming up with an abusive policy.