Ok, I don’t know if it is common in other schools…but I noticed some 300 level biology courses are taught by one person duing entire semester, and there is only one section.
WHY?
Shouldn’t major classes be smaller and/or divided into a few sections? You can’t put 300 students in one classroom and expect a good resul from this, especially if s/he has 2/5 star in ratemyprofessor and just have terrible reputations. It sucks even more because those classe also happen to be upper science classes that I have to take before applying to med schools.
Should I just suck it up and put extra effort?
Ideally. But do they have the time and the manpower to have that happen for every single upper-division class for every single major?? Unlikely.
Probably just a good attitude to have in general.
Also maybe it’s just me but class size has never really affected my performance. If you’re going to sit there and be lectured at, does it really matter whether you’re sitting with 3 people or 300? Sit up front, pay attention, go to office hours, do the homework…
Some classes are small and discussion based, others are lecture based. Like bodangles said, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a 60 person class or a 300 person class if you’re just going to be looking at slides and taking notes.
Biology must be a popular major at your school, as it is at many schools.
My experience was often that a class like this had a couple large lectures per week, then an associated smaller section a couple times a week with a TA.
And if it is a biology class, you are likely to have labs too, which are typically smaller as well.
Form a study group! Or if there aren’t recitation sections already scheduled, see if you can grab 10-15 similarly motivated students and start your own section. There’s probably a TA for the class who at least grades papers and such, so I’d ask that TA if they could come to the section as well.
This is what’s known as a weeder class. They want to weed out pre-meds. You could always wait a semester or two if a different professor teaches it.