Reply to How big are intro class sizes at UVA vs W&M?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When we went to the admitted students day at UVA 2 professors spoke who had classes with 500 plus people (one was a data science class and another was in the history dept I think). One of these classes had a waitlist of over 800 people. I'm not sure this is something to brag about. Parents are paying thousands of dollars for their kids to take this class and likely never get to interact with the superstar professor in a meaningful way. If the professor is a great lecturer, why not have them do a ted talk.[/quote]

Well I HIGHLY doubt that is true. UVA limits waitlists to 199 for one thing. If you’re curious, you can go to louslist.org where you can see the class sizes for every class being offered along with the waitlists. [/quote]

I agree -this is false. There aren’t that many students at UVA. It’s a small flagship of only 16,000 so only 4,000 in entering class ergo it would be impossible to have 1/8 of an entering class of several 100 majors all in one class. My DD started UVA as an engineer. Her largest class was biology intro at 75 and calculus at 100. She switched at end of first year to Econ and politics and had very small seminars of 12 from that point on. She wound up a history major, as had been DW and myself, so we could compare, and received a far better and intimate e patience with those professors (who wrote fantastic letters if rev for her) than we did in our respective history majors in very expensive SLACs.[/quote]

Perhaps your DD tested out, but first-year engineering students at UVA are required to take chemistry, where lectures range in size from 200-400 students.  At least the calc classes for engineering students are kept under 50 people this year, which is good.

There's certainly some wonky stuff happening at UVA when you look at Lou's List.  Intro bio, for example, shows two lecture sections with the same professor, one with capacity for 476 and one with capacity for 435, that have class simultaneously one day a week (but not on other days).  [/quote]

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