Reply to Big state schools - lot of fun, great networks, but do you really learn there?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to Stanford where our class was about 1,300 if I recall correctly. I majored in Human Biology, which at that time was one of the most popular majors on campus. I think there were about 300 of us that graduated with that major. There were years when we all took the main core of the program together in the largest lecture halls on campus. We also took some required classes that overlapped with people doing other majors, such as calculus, chemistry, and statistics. All of those classes had well over 200 people each. I happened to have taken some oddball electives in things outside of my major like ethnic studies and women's studies and those classes had maybe 20 people in them. But the reality is that if you're in a popular major, you'll have large classes throughout your four years, even at the upper levels because everyone with that major needs to take those classes. There will be small sections connected to those large classes that are required and piggy back on the large lectures. These are "taught" by TAs who are grad students and are a mix of helpful and useless, even at a school like Stanford. Maybe at Michigan they break up classes like calculus that are normally taught as large lectures and have 20 PhD professors teach them to 10 kids at a time instead of doing it the usual way where there is 1 PhD prof who teaches the class with the help of 10 grad students. But I highly doubt it.

A computer science, biology, or mechanical engineering major is going to have huge classes throughout their 4 years if they're at a school with more than 1,300/class. Not sure why people are trying to pretend this isn't the case. If you major in music or philosophy, I'm sure that even at the largest schools you'll be in small classes. A TA-led section does not count as a "class" where you have only 15 fellow students since it's not actually a stand-alone class. That person gets paid peanuts to lead that section and is doing it to eat, not for their love of teaching.

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I find this post hard to believe.[/quote]

Stanford University reports that 12% of classes have 50 or more students, while 69% have fewer than 20 students.

Georgetown, Northwestern, U Chicago, and Dartmouth report that only 6% of classes have 50 or more students.

The University of California system schools have a lot of classes of 50 or more students (20% to 24%).[/quote]

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