I just had a few questions:
- Are the classes more lecture or discussion based?
- How much are projects incorporated in classes?
- Are classes taught by a professor of by a TA?
@Clara24 : Glad you are asking…but not good question. Too many variables.
A) Emory is big. This isn’t high school. You can’t just characterize teaching of the overall undergraduate experience, sorry.
B) Professors have control over their own pedagogy in most cases
C) Departments have different teaching cultures or a different distribution of instructors that use some methods versus others (for example, some departments heavily use lecture track faculty versus tenure track faculty for some courses. Lecture track faculty tend to use more engaged methods).
D)Methods and workload can also vary heavily by class size and level of course.
E) Age of tenure track faculty is known to have an effect. Junior faculty (working towards tenure) tend to run more standard courses that may have a lower workload or less rigor overall. Faculty with tenure have no such pattern. They pretty much do what they want to pedagogically because they have tenure and student evaluations cannot affect them (so they spend less time appeasing students. They run the course based upon: A) How much time and resources they have for the course and B) probably the level. A tenured faculty member is less likely to do well or implement best methods for an introductory course. They do better when the course can easily accommodate perspectives from their own research so they do better in upper division and electives on average).
What courses and what departments are your main concern? Without that knowledge, answering any of these is not worthwhile. I will answer if you provide that information. Similar caliber undergraduate schools tend to vary by which departments and programs have strength in undergraduate teaching and not overall profile of teaching, especially if comparing apples to apples (Research versus Research U, LAC vs. LAC, state flagship vs. state flagship).
*I will say that “TAs” rarely teach courses. There are some introductory math and language sections run by graduate students, but trust me when I say this may be for the better. It is either graduate students teaching smaller section sizes versus a lecture. Don’t put tenure track and lecture track faculty on a pedestal when it comes to teaching. To be very blunt, there are likely a lot of graduate students that care more about undergraduate teaching and would do it better than faculty. That is the reality of education at almost all research universities.
@bernie12 How about the biology department?
@viola137 : Yeah no…doesn’t happen for the lectures/regular class sessions. Graduate students are used in intermediate and advanced course discussion sections (you read primary literature and reviews in the field) as necessary, which makes sense because most are required to TA and already do research in that field. Problem solving sessions in general biology are run by undergraduates who did well. All course directors are tenure or lecture track faculty though…
All the other questions depend on the professor, though I would say that Emory biology courses seem much more diverse in style than near peers privates and a lot of other schools where only lecture and then exams and quizzes dominate the syllabus. A lot more instructors employ active learning, p-sets, and other assignments in their courses than in other biology programs at similar size and larger schools (again even those of similar caliber). Even the literature discussion sections are pretty unique (there are also quite a few classes that do not have small group literature discussions but just heavily integrate literature reading and presentations into the “lecture” syllabus). Emory has tried to enhance undergraduate education beyond its stereotypes of being only about lectures, exams, and memorization. I think it is an excellent undergraduate program in retrospect (some places like to claim that such and such department is strong because the place has a healthcare system or a good research apparatus. Low and behold, further investigation reveals that almost all classes are stereotypical old school memorization, lecture style biology courses. Effort simply has not been put forth to reform them on a massive scale).
I encourage you to go here and look at all of the effort put into biology and other STEM curricula at Emory over a long timespan:
A lot of HHMI grant money has gone towards this: http://cse.emory.edu/home/for_students/graduate_students/hhmi/hhmiccurriculum.html