Class Sizes @ Dartmouth

<p>Everytime you visit and surf through Dartmouth's website, you see these large classes with 50+ students. I thought Dartmouth was dedicated to undergrad. Please are darthmouth classes really big? Comments?</p>

<p>You should appreciate thier frankness...some of your frosh classes are going to be big...that's true for anywhere. But the VAST majority of classes...even in freshman year...will be 15-30. Some will be smaller...few will be larger.</p>

<p>BTW...I see that you are new...welcome to the board.</p>

<p>Intro science classes are going to be big no matter where you go. However Dartmouth does have lots of small classes, one example: freshman seminars are capped at 16 people.</p>

<p>Of the classes I've taken at Dartmouth, only three have been over 50 (54, 89 and 110, respectively). All were large intro science courses. I'd argue, though that this is very typical and that at a lot of other schools, the intro courses will be a lot larger.</p>

<p>On the other side of the coin, over 3/4 of the courses I've taken are under 40, over half have been under twenty, and about 20% have been under ten. And those numbers are only going to go up as I start taking more upper-level seminar courses. </p>

<p>Two other points. First, one of the main points of the $1.3 billion capital campaign is the hiring of new faculty, to bring class sizes even lower. Second, Dartmouth faculty are very understanding and very helpful; you can get research opportunities early on, and also get chances to take graduate-level courses as undergrad (someone I know is auditing a Tuck course next fall, another is taking a graduate biology course).</p>