Do regular faculty teach all the classes at Brown, or does the university employ a lot of graduate students for introductory level courses?
My son is mostly planning to apply to very small liberal arts colleges, and Brown is one of the few larger universities that interest him. The LACs like to boast that unlike universities, all their classes are taught by faculty.
It’s very typical for graduate students to teach 100 level and sometimes 200. I go to university at Albany and almost all sections of calculus 1,2 and 3 are taught by a graduate student.
Yes, this is common. I am wondering specifically about Brown, though.
The only graduate student I ever had teach a class was calc 2. Every other class was a prof. It is rare for grad students to teach classes. Leading smaller sections in between lectures is a little more common.
Grad students do teach smaller sections – large lecture classes are broken down into smaller pieces and those are typically led by grad students. (Sometimes they are better than the professor.) But the lectures are given by the professors.
Grad students are more common in the very large intro classes. Once you move into upper level classes, you get professors.
All the classes I took at Brown (including the very large science classes) were taught by professors. You might have section once or twice a week that’s run by a grad student, but all lectures are the professors. I’d say that Brown’s definitely more LAC-like in that way - remember also that the number of grad students at Brown isn’t all that large.
@Fireandrain’s information must be outdated.
Generally, all classes at Brown are taught by professors, with the exception being some introductory language courses (taught by native speaker graduate students), some low level math classes (e.g., MATH 0090, 0100, etc.; these classes usually also offer sections taught by professors instead of grad students if you prefer), and low-level writing classes (e.g., “The Academic Essay” is often taught by grad students). There might be a few cases where post-doctoral fellows or visiting scholars teach classes, but this is rare.
The vast, vast majority of classes you will take at Brown will be taught by Brown faculty. Yes, this includes principles of econ, organic chemistry, etc. etc. This is definitely not the case at a lot of schools. Having a cognitive neuroscientist instead of a second year Ph.D. student teaching your introductory psych class really does make a difference.
Generally, classes over 40 have weekly (mandatory or optional, up to instructor) recitation sessions. These may be led by undergraduate or graduate student teaching assistants. I’ve found that undergraduate TA’s tend to be more common overall (as @bruno14 alludes to), although I do get the sense that graduate student TA’s are more common in the humanities (e.g., history) whereas undergraduate TA’s are more common in the sciences (e.g., neuroscience). Also, lower-level classes are more likely to have undergraduate than graduate student TA’s.
Hope this helps!
Also, to follow up on the “classes over 40” bit–this is uncommon, too! I think something like 69% of classes are under 20 students, with only around 3% over 100. Many, many classes do not have TA’s, in which case the course staff consists solely of the (almost always) faculty professor.
My daughter just graduated as a CS major. None of her classes in her major had less than 70 students and many were over 100. These classes had lots of TAs though, so there was typically a 1:8 TA/student ratio and lots of support through lab sessions and office hours.
She did have small classes in foreign language, literature and history, but the particular classes she took in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science were large as well.
She never had a class taught by a grad student, but in one of her math classes a grad student taught one of the sections. She wishes she had sighed up for that section because the grad student taught it better than the prof.