Class sizes at Swarthmore?

<p>How big are the largest classes at Swarthmore? Which courses are usually the largest?</p>

<p>Intro to Psych and Both semesters of Bio (cellular and molecular and population and orgasomething) are probably the biggest, at about 100. I don’t know about psych, but bio breaks into labs of like, 15-20 - led by profs. The next biggest classes most people will take are like, 30-35, for popular intro social science courses.</p>

<p>Something that surprised me: some of the English classes here are huge. In The Twentieth-Century Novel, there are 43 students signed up; Tolkien & Pullman has 42; US Fiction 35; Modernism has 46. But a lot of people might just be shopping. Add/drop isn’t over yet. My English class last semester had about 25 people.</p>

<p>43 students is “huge”?</p>

<p>You are very spoiled, buddy!</p>

<p>Here are the class sizes from last semester:</p>

<p>


  2 to 9  133 36.6%
10 to 19    166 36.9%
20 to 29    59  19.3%
30 to 39    11  3.9%
40 to 49    8   1.1%
50 to 99    5   1.9%
100 plus    2   0.3%</p>

<p>total           363 100.0%

</p>

<p>Historical data is available here:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/ClassSize.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/ClassSize.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>You can get the enrollment for any class by finding the class in the Tri-Co online catlog and clicking the course link. In the course description will be CUR ENR or current enrollment.</p>

<p>Intro Psych only had 59 last semester. One of the two biggies was ECON 011, Intermediate Micro with 101 students. However, it was also broken up into six discussion sections, each meeting once a week with the professor in groups of 15 to 19 students. The other biggie was Intro Bio 011. This had 117 students for the lecture, but five lab sections each taught (3 hours a week) by a faculty member. The largest of these was 26 students.</p>

<p>Only one English lit course last fall had more than 30 students. The core course Short Story in the US had 48. On the flip side, the entire selection of intro Literature courses is taught as First Year Seminars, capped at 12 students.</p>

<p>Thank you all for your very helpful replies! Class sizes sound pretty ideal, although some are larger than you might guess given the 8:1 student faculty ratio. </p>

<p>So, now I have a follow-up question: how often do students find themselves shut out of classes? Is it fairly common for freshmen to have to wait a year or two to get into the really popular classes? Do class lotteries take into account seniority?</p>

<p>Thanks again!</p>

<p>It’s a difficult question to answer,but from my daughter’s experience, if you plan in advance to some degree, you can take every class you wish within your 4 years at Swat. I guess one-time classes taught by guest faculty could be an exception.</p>

<p>^ My kids’ experiences tally with nngmm’s. Though courses with visiting professors can make things tricky, if you pay attention and plan ahead, you should be able to take the classes you want. </p>

<p>My senior was never closed out of anything; she just feels as if there wasn’t enough time to take every class she was interested in.</p>

<p>^^^</p>

<p>Same here. Our D got lotteried out of her top picks for First-Year-Seminars, but took two more that she enjoyed. The FYS are capped at 12 students and some of them (like Jane Austen and Harry Potter) are exceptionally popular, so you can count on these being lotteried. After freshman year, I don’t believe she was ever lotteried.</p>

<p>The lottery rules vary from dept to dept and you can find them under each department at the website. There are priorities given to students who have gotten lotteried out. They have first dibs at enrolling for any other open course in the department. Depending on the course, preferences may be given to first year students (for an intro pre-req) or to upper class majors (for a required major course). It just all depends. It’s pretty fair.</p>

<p>Part of declaring a major is a sophmore paper that includes the courses you plan to take junior and senior years. So the process of looking to see what courses are offered which years is built into the system.</p>

<p>I would agree that my D’s biggest problem was not having enough slots to take all the courses that were interesting to her. Taking five courses is very tempting when the offerings are so attractive, but you have to be ruthlessly honest with yourself in assessing the workloads and your time. 25% more reading each week can start to pile up.</p>

<p>Thanks yet again! Your replies have given me an excellent sense for how Swarthmore manages to balance class size and accessibility. I’m also heartened to hear that your children wished they had more time to take more courses. That’s a ringing endorsement of the educational atmosphere at Swarthmore – and for the liberal arts in general.</p>