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][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]

I know a calculus class of 100 is probably pretty good for a state flagship, but, my God, this is something to brag about? What are our standards for education here, where a 100-person calculus class would remotely be seen as acceptable? What would us parents say if our kids’ AP calculus class in high school had 100 students?

UVA is a great in-state option if you live in Virginia. I get it. It’s cheap. If you are not a Virginia resident, a 54k oos tuition for that? Davidson’s tuition is 57k. I would say that 3k extra would be money well spent.[/quote]

This is why it's important to cull thru the CDS for each school your kid is considering, if class size matters (and IMO it should).  With my first, I was able to determine only 4.5% of classes are 100+ from the CDS.  Then if found the school's more detailed data about class sizes over the last 5+ years for each department.  So I knew that Bio101/102, Chem 101/102, A&P, PHY101/102 and some Econ classes would be over 100+. The big science courses always have discussion sections capped at 24.  But I also knew that they were capped at 150-200 students, which IMO is very different than a large school where it's can be 500+ for those popular courses. I also could figure out that for my kid after those intro courses, most would be less than 50.

Same for 2nd kid.  That kid's school has much smaller courses overall.  But for the intro premen/eng courses and calc 1 it can be 200 students.  However, those courses have recitations of 8-10 students each week so extremely small, 1-1 opportunities available.

Basically, if class size matters (and it really should), then you can figure out exactly what they are typically for your kid's path.   No way would my kid attend a school with classes regularly over 100 beyond those few intro, and certainly not if those intros were 400-500 kids. 
[/quote]

NP. What is CDS? I'd like to look into this more.[/quote]

Common Data set

It's an easy way to compare a ton of data from different schools, as the CDS is standardized[/quote]

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