what is a college recitation?

[Anonymous]

At Maryland, introductory courses in economics or psychology had a senior professor lecturing to 100+ students - too large to ask questions. Then on Fridays, a friendly Ph.D. student showed 20 students how to actually do the homework, and told us what would be on the test.

Expensive private colleges have more professors in the classroom. But they still like to have large sections to put their celebrity professors in front of freshmen.

[Anonymous]

My university never had them. No TAs. Class discussions happened after and sometimes during lectures.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Recitation sections only exist in schools that have graduate programs. The reason for the existence of recitation sections is to offload all of the teaching other than the lecturing (e.g., the answering questions, reviewing assignments, and the grading) onto a graduate student to free up the professor to do research, to help train the graduate student to become a teacher themselves, and to more efficiently teach large numbers of students without hiring more tenured or tenure-track professors. If a professor is running the recitation section, the recitation section accomplishes none of that. They just do it all of that during normal class time.

Ah, no. At my school the recitations were led by undergrad TAs.

Thinking that a school is better because it offers strictly fewer hours of teaching is a a weird take.