Reply to Rankings factors which are irrelevant to undergraduate experience

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Rankings factors which are irrelevant to undergraduate experience "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Many of the factors that go into college rankings seem irrelevant to the undergrad experience, particularly for non-STEM. Factors like research tier status, athletics conferences, and graduate programs seem less important than things like student to professor ratio, likelihood that a class will be on line, likelihood that grad student will teach a class, etc.

Where can I go to find rankings that disaggregate the less relevant factors?[/quote]

USNWR has separate rankings for best undergraduate teaching.  For student to professor ration and class size, I would do it by hand, so to speak, and go to a each school's Common Data Set.  I think that it is Section I for class sizes and C6 for student/faculty ratio.  Class size is done by quintile.  I did this last year, informative.  As an aside, Catholic schools are striking for the small sizes of their classes.

For graduate students teaching classes, you will probably have to do the work of looking through the school's program and course catalog materials for the kid's majors of interest, and/or contact the program.  Perhaps, look for threads on Reddit.  Generally, large publics are reportedly known for more for this than privates (UMich, UIUC, UNC maybe Pitt, too).  Maybe, others have more insight into more readily available sources.

Probably the same with online. [/quote]

My DC goes to a large public and has never had a grad student teach a class.  I think the OP has an agenda here.
NP[/quote]

At my Ivy League school, 5 of my classes (out of 32 total) were taught by grad students. This included math classes through linear algebra. [/quote]

I never had a grad student teach a class…they ran recitations, but were never the professor for the class (nor even ran a single class).

My kid at an Ivy has also never had a grad student teach a class.

I find this difficult to believe.[/quote]
Recitations or discussion sections, or whatever you want to call them: they are, say,  1x a week, and the large class with a real prof is 2x a week.

A smaller college or university: class with prof. 3x a week.

This means your little grad student is teaching 1/3 of these time.

Glad you understand.[/quote]

Nobody cares if a TA runs a recitation which are typically just review and an opportunity for students to ask questions.  The professor has office hours if there are still questions.

[/quote]

My kid did. He went to a large state flagship and was not getting what he needed from this model so transferred to a smaller private. No TA led discussion or recitation session at his new school. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics