<p>This is my major qualm w/ Cornell, as i've noted on other posts. As someone who will most likely spend time in the humanities department, can someone comment on the class size aspect of Cornell for me. In addition, I've read a few articles online about this subject. One article that I found from the Cornell Daily Sun talked about Cornell's ability to jump to a top 5 university if they could dramatically decrease their class sizes. Apparently in 1999, Cornell was ranked 6th by usnews b/c they had 74% of classes under 20. Does anyone know about plans to return to this? Has anyone heard about plans to decrease class sizes at Cornell? Will Cornell rise in the rankings in the future?</p>
<p>It seems like you're only interested in smaller class size because it will increase Cornell's usnwr ranking.</p>
<p>Actually i'm interested in them b/c I like them. Don't make inferences w/ only highly circumstantial evidence. I created this thread b/c I just wanted to know people's thoughts/ answers to my questions. Thanks for trying to turn it into an ad hominon arena.</p>
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<p>Humanities classes usually have small class size(10-20 students). Some popular humities classes may have large number of students in them but even then those classes are divided into smaller sections for the purpose of disscussion.</p>
<p>cool, thanks. Keep this going though.</p>
<p>I'm just making an observation. </p>
<p>If you simply think smaller class size is conducive to a better academic experience, then why include all this sh|t:
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...talked about Cornell's ability to jump to a top 5 university if they could dramatically decrease their class sizes. Apparently in 1999, Cornell was ranked 6th by usnews b/c they had 74% of classes under 20...
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...Will Cornell rise in the rankings in the future?
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<p>b/c academic experience correlates, though very loosely, to usnews rankings.</p>
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b/c academic experience correlates, though very loosely, to usnews rankings.
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<p>hmmm......</p>
<p>What about the size of engineering classes? Oh, sorry to hijack this thread!</p>
<p>Nonsense. Two of the best academic experiences in the country may be had at Deep Springs and Reed, which aren't ranked all that highly.</p>
<p>Bottom line -- the most important factor in the academic experience is you. If you don't take an interest in the material and go out of your way to develop relationships with faculty, you won't have much of an academic experience. Do you think some of the football players at Harvard or Yale are having much of an academic experience if they just want to party and play football? Of course not.</p>
<p>I have a bunch of friends at Cornell who went on for PhD study at the Harvards and Princetons and Stanfords of the worlds, and guess what? They didn't find the academic experience all that different from the one at Cornell. Only at Harvard there was a much greater emphasis on teaching fellows, rather than professors, presenting the material. And at Princeton, my grad student friend thought the introductory biological science courses that he TAed were a joke and that the students didn't really learn anything. And then there is the professor I had who recently graduated from Stanford with his PhD, and he found the academic experience at Cornell a breath of fresh air. At Cornell (gasp!) the students were actually interested in learning and doing work, whereas at Stanford he found that students were generally trying to compete as to who could slack off the most.</p>
<p>I think I already answered your questions pretty extensively over in the other thread, but I'll expand a bit on the rankings inquiry. One of the reasons why Cornell was ranked so highly in 1998 was because that the class size factor included all students who were in honors and independent study tutorials, which are necessarily a 1 on 1 class. U.S. News since decided that these shouldn't be considered classes (for whatever arbitrary reason) and Cornell's strength in this category fell.</p>
<p>The worst way to make your college decision is to base it off the U.S. News rankings. Pick it based on the program you are interested in, how comfortable you feel on campus, and whether or not you feel like you can identify with the student body. And what's sad, is that a lot of students just stick to the rankings. Since graduating, I've ran into a fair amount of people who picked Duke or UPenn just because the ranking was slightly higher than Notre Dame or Brown or Northwestern or Cornell, and I get the sense that they weren't all that happy with their college experience. It's particularly telling when they are around a bunch of happy and friendly Cornell alums.</p>
<p>And engineering classes are definitely going to by larger than humanities courses, at least until 400 level courses. Engineers like their efficiency, and they feel that they can present information in a lecture of 50 students just as well as they can present information in a lecture of 25 students. But don't worry you will have plenty of time in office hours and sections to ask questions, etc.</p>
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b/c academic experience correlates, though very loosely, to usnews rankings.
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<p>Nonsense.</p>
<p>Someone already showed you the median grade reports that has the class sizes listed. If you feel you must have class sizes of 10 rather than 25, than don't come to Cornell. </p>
<p>As for 1999, Cornell submitted inaccurate data which artificially boosted its ranking for that one year. Cornell wouldn't be "returning" to anything. It has always been like this.</p>
<p>classes of 25 are fine. </p>
<p>Anways, my earlier claim, just a claim, was based on the following articles:
Cornell</a> Assemblies | SA / 20050421 Meeting Minutes browse</p>
<p>Cornellians</a> Debate Class Sizes | The Cornell Daily Sun</p>
<p>Keep in mind, looking at school-wide data for student/faculty is useless. Some majors (like bio) have enormous classes. As a bio major, many of my upper div courses had 75+ people. That's fine for me because a) I like large classes and b) science courses are conducive to large lectures. There's not much discussion involved in science courses.</p>
<p>However, that's irrelevant for you unless you plan on taking a large amount of bio courses. Most of the humanities courses at Cornell have around 20-25 kids. Some people might say, "Come to my LAC! We have classes sizes of 5-10. That's 5X smaller than Cornell's classes. omg omg omg!" But, in the end, we're still just talking about a class size of 5 compared to 20. I don't know about you but in a discussion-style class, I'd rather hear the opinions of 20 people rather than the same 4 people over and over again for 75 minutes straight. </p>
<p>Class size is usually a worry for science majors who feel they may not be able to get help from the professor (although I haven't found that to be true). I haven't heard many humanities majors complain about class sizes.</p>
<p>To the OP: You have to admit, the last part of your post does make it sound like you're concerned with rankings. I do think it's interesting, though, that changes in ranking methodology caused such a great difference despite no significant change in Cornell. It shows that rankings don't necessarily reflect actual quality of education. As for class sizes, I'm not taking any humanities courses, but my friends who do don't complain about class size. So I assume it's not really a problem. Looking at the median grade reports, I see a lot of classes with enrollment under 25. </p>
<p>Tsenguun: First semester engineering math lectures are often very small, around 25. I think they do this on purpose to make it easier on freshmen. Otherwise, lectures can be large, although that's not necessarily a bad thing for engineers. They're divided into smaller sections anyway, and professors are very accessible, so you shouldn't have any problem at all.</p>