Can you explain this math to me? I don’t get it. You roughly take 35 classes to get a degree at a semester school like Harvard. So you would have to be in roughly 16 classes or so with 50+ students to make the above statement true. How do you go from 10% of the classes at Harvard are over 50+ students to the above statement? Given the number of classes in junior and senior years in all the departments of a large university like Harvard, it seems highly unlikely that the total number of freshman/sophomore class sections will dwarf the total number of upper division classes. Since the lower division classes are the ones that are more likely to be larger classes, unless they just overwhelm the upper division classes in numbers, I don’t see how you can get the 50% number?
I would have thought that even if you assume 40% of the lower division classes are large classes and 20% of upper division classes are large classes, that would bring the total number of 50+ size classes to maybe 10 classes. That would still be only around 25% of the classes that a typical student takes. My feeling is that the number is realistically probably 15%