<p>Can someone provide an estimated average class size for McGill undergraduate humanities and social science classes? I understand they can be enormous first year. Are there discussion-based seminars after that?</p>
<p>(Sorry if this has been addressed previously, I couldn't find the answer).</p>
<p>classes can range from 50 to 300. the largest lecture hall at mcgill holds 600 but i don’t believe there are any sociology, philosophy, anthropology, etc classes in there. i’d say the average is about 150, which is large but deceiving. imagine it as 10 rows of students, 15 across and it is actually quite small. anyway, all humanities classes have discussion groups/conferences that usually replace a single class each week. These are generally 20-50 people (depending on the TA schedules) and often have participation requirements to ensure students follow along and understand.</p>
<p>Thanks.
How many hours/day are spent in class (including the discussion group sessions)?</p>
<p>most classes are hour-long on MWF and hour and a half on TR, seeing as most classes are 3 credits, meaning 3hours a week you will have about 3x5 = 15hrs of class a week. more if you have labs and optional TA tutoring sessions, but discussions/conferences usually (not always) take the place of one course per week. so average that out and most kids have about 2-3 hours of class a day, but schedules can be made to have all your classes either on TR only or MWF only if desired and available. curious why you ask.</p>
<p>In a response to another poster on another thread, I looked up class sizes at Tufts University. The other poster claimed that, unlike McGill, Tufts had no large classes. Tufts undergraduate enrolment is less than 5000 students yet I found quite a few classes with 100 to 150 students and a few with 300 to 400 students. And Tufts tuition is $39,000/year! </p>
<p>Any university, as opposed to a liberal arts college, is going to have some large introductory classes. You can go to a university website and search for “class schedule”. It will list the enrolment limit of each course offered.</p>
<p>klmnop- I asked how long students are in class on average as a follow-up because the time students spend there is to me as important as the class size. I toured a LAC with a great reputation and small class sizes, but was disappointed to find out that students only went to 2 hours of class per day. And the COA was $50,000+.</p>
<p>thats interesting. i don’t think you’ll find a lot of schools where students on avg. have more than 3hrs. however, in sciences there are lots of long labs. for instance, chem and bio labs can last anywhere from 4-7 hours once a week (ive had these). on the other hand, at mcgill a lot of the science classes are recorded because the amount of material is often ridiculous… thus many science students skip classes altogether and watch them at home. obviously this is not the intent of the faculty, in fact it is highly encouraged to go to class, but students do this nonetheless.</p>
<p>its different for different faculties. many arts classes aren’t recorded and notes by the professor aren’t available so missing a single class sets you way back… thus arts kids should attend class more frequently.</p>