Looking for an RPI student to let me know the average class size for freshman/sophmore courses like Calc ll or Chem compared to class size of a civil engineering major course work? Also, are all courses taught by faculty or T.A.'s?
It is official RPI policy that a course cannot be taught by a TA. You will always have a faculty member as the professor for a course, regardless of the course. In addition, only around 5% of faculty do not have the highest degree in their field and typically it’s because they were very successful in industry. For example, there’s a fairly popular professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department that only has an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, but did some crazy stuff with sound acoustics and was also a famous rock artists in the 1980s.
However, for intro courses it’s common for them to be split up into small sections with graduate TA’s and undergraduate mentor’s. Those sections will be used in many courses to administer exams and quizzes as well as review course material. In one of those courses such as Calculus I/III, Chemistry I/II, or Physics I/II you will have 3 hours of lecture each week plus an hour or two of recitation. On top of that, you will also have lab for a few hours a week.
In terms of class sizes it depends on the course, how popular it is, what professor you take it with, and at what time. Chemistry I varies typically from 20-50 students depending on these factors. I’d say that’s also conventionally true for Chemistry II, Physics I/II, and Calculus I/II. The great thing is that 20%-40% of students stop going to class after the first few weeks and around the same percentage typically drop so the class gets much smaller as the semester progresses. For the 20 person lecture it would probably go to like 12-15 by the end of the semester and like 30-40 for the 50 person lecture. And, again, not all of those students will even go to class.
Once you leave the intro courses it gets a lot smaller, especially if you’re in civil engineering. You’ll probably typically have courses with 15-20 students in your core courses. Junior/senior-level courses can be less than 10 or more than 20 depending on which you take. The average RPI course is around 15-20 students.
P.S. Smaller departments have smaller course sizes. Engineering and CS courses will be slightly larger, for example, than humanities, business, or non-intro science courses. I’ve taken a lot of business, ITWS, and humanities courses where the class ended up being less than 10 kids.
@joedoe -Thanks for the detail! So happy to hear your response! My s committed last night, so we r excited to come up 4 admitted students day on Sat. Will u b around a station Sat? Would love 2 put a face with all the help u provided.