<p>So my son is really close to saying yes to Carolina OOS but has some reservation about the class sizes and how that might affect his level of engagement and learning. Can any current non-honors students provide information about the number of students in their various classes and also any suggestions for making Carolina a smaller and more intimate learning environment right from the start. I think he's worried that with large classes comes passivity--his own and his classmates. Thanks.</p>
<p>He may want to look into the living-learning communities.
[Living</a> Learning Communities | UNC Chapel Hill Housing and Residential Education](<a href=“http://housing.unc.edu/residence-life/living-learning-communities]Living”>http://housing.unc.edu/residence-life/living-learning-communities)</p>
<p>Also, getting involved in activities that he’s passionate about will put him in a group of like minded classmates</p>
<p>No question, there are a lot of very large classes at UNC.</p>
<p>Most of the 100- or 200-level classes are taught in one of two ways:</p>
<p>(1) a professor lecturing 200 students twice a week, then on Friday a TA discussion with 25</p>
<p>or (2) a grad student class with 40, two or three times a week</p>
<p>Obviously, both of these are pretty unacceptable. In particular, the TA ‘discussion’ recitations are often a joke: 25 people in a 50 minute class means less than 2 minutes per person, and that’s assuming the TA doesn’t lecture or talk for some of the time (they always do).</p>
<p>This becomes less of a problem as they start doing 300- and 400-level courses, which tend to be smaller and taught by professors.</p>
<p>By contrast, in Cambridge you get one or two ‘supervisions’ per week which are an hour long, where it’s just you, the tutor and one other student (occasionally none, occasionally two).</p>
<p>If your son can get through the first couple of years of large classes (or place out of them) then it shouldn’t be a problem. But there’s no denying that a lot of the classes at UNC are very large, even the ‘discussion sections’.</p>
<p>Of course, if he’s really proactive he can fight this by going to office hours every week for a chat. That might replicate the intensity of learning at Cambridge in some ways if he’s disciplined. But in my experience many students intend to do this, but very few ever get around to it.</p>
<p>Hope this helps!</p>
<p>Good grief, keepittoyourself, comparing UNC to Cambridge? I doubt any UNC student would do that, regardless of how passionate they are about UNC.</p>
<p>Just as a disclaimer, I am in the Honor’s Program, but I was not accepted into the program when I was admitted, I applied second semester of my first year here. I’ll limit my discussion to non-Honors classes, which I have taken plenty of.</p>
<p>The previous poster was correct that 100-200 level courses do have about 200 students, but these are generally for classes that a large number of people need to take. Intro science, history, and other general education classes come to mind. Only 5% of classes at UNC have 100 students or more, and almost half have 25 students or less. Core classes, namely intro English, math, and foreign language classes are capped at 20-25 students if I remember correctly.</p>
<p>As far as who teaches the classes, 99% of classes at UNC are taught by professors, not TAs. In fact, I had never even heard of a class at UNC being taught by a graduate student until 2 months ago, and that is definitely the exception not the rule. Most larger classes have recitation sections that are taught by graduate students and teacher’s assistants, but as I said before, the classes themselves are taught by professors, not grad students.</p>
<p>As far being in a learning environment, there are a lot of ways to do that. Going to office hours is a definite thing to do, and making friends in those large classes can help, to make unofficial study groups. Another thing I would highly recommend is to take a First Year Seminar, classes offered exclusively to first years capped at 18 students.</p>
<p>Hope this helped.</p>
<p>My son entered UNC with 43 AP credits so he was able to bypass many intro level classes and was taking many upper division classes by second semester freshman year. That said, I asked him a while back about class size. In his four years at UNC he had three (3) classes with more than 150 students in them and two were in classes he WANTED to take, one bing the History of Rock and Roll which at that time was taught by a legendary professor and was considered a “must take” class. The majority of classes were 12-24 people and he had a number with 8-10 by junior and senior year. Engagement was not an issue…he took two freshman seminars that he thought were terrific and that actually helped influence his eventual majors.</p>
<p>Large intro level classes occur most places with the possible exception being at very small LACs. UNC limits/caps the size of Math, English and language classes which many schools don’t do.</p>
<p>I have mentioned this story before but freshman year my S was taking an advanced calculus class (after getting a 5 on AP/BC calc exam) and his class was approx 60 in number taught by a full professor. His best friend from HS taking the same class at Wharton was in a class of 300+ taught by a TA. Like I said, it can and does happen most everywhere.</p>
<p>He will find some passivity in most entry level classes at virtually any school, again with the only real exception being at a very small LAC. UNC can be many things to different people-it can practically be anything a given student wants it to be; they can remain anonymous in large classes if that’s what they want or they can have an engaged experience and develop relationships with professors and get involved with research as early as freshman year if that’s what they want.</p>
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<p>Then you’re not looking hard enough. Pick a humanities department, and find an intro course with 40 seats or less. There is a very good chance it is taught by a graduate student. Now, it may be a 5th year grad student who is commonly mistaken for a young professor, but it will be a grad student.</p>
<p>Eadad it mostly sounds like we are in agreement – though with 50 minute class meetings, 24 students is still a very high number.</p>
<p>I did say 12-24…not all were at the top end of that number and even if they were, it’s not hard to engage with 20-24 people in a room…seriously.</p>
<p>It’s important to remember that a fifth year Ph.D candidate can be and often is a better “teacher” than a tenured prof who hates teaching undergrads and only does so because they have to. This is a common complaint at many schools especially at Harvard.</p>
<p>A close family friend’s father was a Dean at Harvard and I got to know both his wife and him after he retired. Their favorite comment about Harvard was: “it’s such a shame to have to waste all that is great about Harvard and Cambridge on undergrads.”…his wife’s version was to substitute the words “share” and “with” for “'waste” and “on.”</p>
<p>In fact the ONLY bad class my son had while at UNC was with a tenured prof who he said was “mailing it in.” I had a similar experience many years ago as an undergrad. Just having the title doesn’t guarantee a quality learning experience.</p>
<p>Having a PH.D candidate who really cares and is very engaging teach a class is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, just the opposite.</p>
<p>Oh no, I totally agree. I think that a final-year phd student is liable to be a very good teacher in many cases, not least because they have to keep their teaching evaluations up to help with jobhunting!</p>
<p>But we should not lose sight of the fact that they are graduate students. There’s a big difference between ‘you will be taught by grad students but they are good’ and ‘you won’t be taught by grad students’. If the former is the case, then let’s be honest about it.</p>
<p>I also think that grad students can be some of the worst teachers-- in many cases, they are assigned classes that they know very little about.</p>
<p>You are right that 20-24 people in a room is not that bad … but it simply cannot compare to 2 or even 10 people in a room. As I mentioned, 20 people in 50 minutes means less than 3 minutes of discussion per person.</p>
<p>Trouble is that the public information is not that useful, if you’re trying to figure out how many students are actually in each class. The number registered at the start of the semester is not always a reliable guide. Oh, and a stupid eyeroll face back to you.</p>
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<p>They are a major part: students there typically get at least one supervision per week. No doubt about the large lectures. But better than a 25 person discussion section, no?</p>