<p>I saw a passing remark in another thread here recently that I want to get a reality check on. The statement was that Harvard and other Ivy League colleges have lots of classes taught by teaching assistants. I have heard contrary statements. What is the reality? </p>
<p>My personal experience base is attending a large state university, in which I had some courses with a lecture taught by a professor, and additional class meetings for recitation taught by teaching assistants. Quite a few of my courses, even if they were very small in enrollment, were taught by full professors. I don't think the state university I attended was lavishly funded, but I was readily able to arrange two directed study courses (in my major subject) without either professor complaining of being too busy. </p>
<p>How is it at Harvard today? How is it at Yale? How is it at Princeton? How is it at the other five Ivy League colleges? Do Ivy League undergraduates have a lot of large lecture courses for which they need opera glasses to see the lecturer, and lots of sections taught by teaching assistants, or don't they?</p>
<p>I am not sure how things are done across the board as each department does things differently!</p>
<p>In Core classes, the instructor is always a prof. The Core classes can range from a couple of dozen students to nearly a thousand. Each class usually has a discussion section which is led by a TF and is capped at 18. Some profs choose to lead one section "to keep their hands in." The TFs are all grad students, and most of the time they are Harvard students. However, in some cases, grad students from other institutions can be recruited if their area of specialization dovetails nicely with the course and it is thought undergraduate students will benefit from their expertise and experience.</p>
<p>In many tutorial classes (for sophomores and juniors) classes are broken down further into groups of 5, also led by a graduate TF. The prof lectures once a week for a couple of hours, then the groups meet separately for discussions and to go over writing.</p>
<p>In math classes, sections are led by undergraduate Course Assistants (CAs) who have either taken the class or a class above (eg. a Math 55 graduate can be CA for Math 25 and below). The sections are capped at 18. In upper-level math classes there are often CAs or TFs even in classes with fairly low enrolments. S took a class that had only 9 students but had one CA.
The math departments offers tutorials on specific topics that change every year. These tutorials are offered by graduate students. S took one that had four other students in it.</p>
<p>Social Analysis 10 (also known as Ec 10) is conducted along different lines. I think that is true as well of Math classes at the level of 21 (Multivariable Calculus) and below, but I am not familiar with how it's really done.</p>
<p>Two of the best courses I took were opera glass courses - so that's not always bad. Some of my TAs were amazing even if they were grad students. My info is out of date, but in my day language courses were small, ie. less than 20, (some taught by grad students, some by faculty), almost all my VES courses were small, freshmen seminars are small, some of the special majors - Comp. Religion, Comp. Lit and History and Lit among others had small required tutorials for majors. Most graduate seminars are small and many have minimal prerequisites.</p>
<p>It may be a difference in language. In many schools, larger courses are "taught" by professors in lectures, but the students may have the most contact with the TAs in the recitation or sections. TAs may have the office hours, and may grade the papers. That happened with the summer class my d took at Cornell. Cornell could legitimately say that the course was taught by a professor, but d had much more interaction with her TA.</p>
<p>My information is almost exactly as out of date as mathmom's, although I have heard nothing in recent years that leads me to believe that anything has changed. At my college, the "opera glass" courses tended to be that way because they were great -- top-quality professors who were also showmen, with the creme de la creme of TAs. The largest lecture classes -- Vin Scully's History of Art, Gaddis Smith's 20th Century Diplomacy, Harold Bloom's whatever he was talking about that year, Arthur Galston's Bio for Poets -- tended to be exciting educational experiences. A huge lecture course changed my life my freshman year, and I wasn't even registered in it (but the professor became my advisor and mentor).</p>
<p>Some courses were taught differently. Freshman comp type courses were usually taught in small sections by (very) junior faculty members, but some grad students were in there, too. (There were large lectures for those courses every other week or so.) I never took any math, but I suspect lower-level math was similar, as would introductory foreign language courses have been. It's silly to expect a famous Racine scholar to teach you how to conjugate irregular verbs.</p>
<p>I had one course where there were five discussion sections, two of which were led by tenured faculty, two by junior faculty, and one by a grad student. That grad student was no slouch, I promise you. (I had had him as my TA in a different lecture course two years earlier, and I signed up to take a seminar he was offering. He was one of the best teachers I've ever had, and he wound up as a department chair at Michigan.)</p>
<p>I'll repeat here, however, a story I heard from a math grad student at a different Ivy League university a few years ago, apropos of teaching a section of freshman calculus. He said, "I really hate teaching. The students are so dumb and so hyper. About the only thing I like about it is watching the predictable progression from the first class, where they're all thrilled they got a TA who is a native English speaker, to the point where they realize that they would have been much better off with someone who only spoke Chinese but who gave a crap about them."</p>
<p>Columbia has a core with small classes (11-17) and a set curriculum. Students are randomly assigned, and about half the instructors are professors, the other half grad students, all from a variety of departments My S only had grad students. HOWEVER, these are people perhaps a year away from being assistant profs somewhere, who are required to have previous teaching experience, guided by a core curriculum office, and who give the same tests, also centrally designed. My S's experience with the year long freshman Lit Hum and sophomore Contemporary Civilization was excellent.</p>
<p>In the intro classes in science and econ, it's the typical mob scene. Lecture halls of 150 to, maybe, 300. Recitation sections led by TAs. Once more, some of the TAs taught better than the professors. Mid-level classes vary by department. A cosmology class he took sophomore year, taught by a prof, was about 20 students. Econ, on the other hand, tended to be 50-70. Again, though, all taught by profs.</p>
<p>His courses senior year are all taught by profs. They range from an econ seminar (12), to an upper level math class (70), a mathematical physics class (19), a graduate physics class (9), a lower division computer science class (60 plus), and an astromony seminar (7).</p>
<p>As a freshman at Harvard last fall, my D had four classes. There were 12 in her freshman seminar in Anthropology, about 15 each in her Spanish and Writing classes, and 930 in Econ. The small classes were very personal, there was a cookout at a prof's house, etc. The huge class met once every couple weeks in a large theatre, then had several class sessions a week in between with TAs in groups of 25-30. She actually liked the Econ class - the TA was outstanding, and the large sessions were a change of pace. In the spring, her classes were all smaller.</p>
<p>I was at Yale last weekend for the info session and tour and if I recall correctly, the presenter who graduated 2 years ago said he had several classes there with 1 student (himself). You better have the homework done for that one.</p>
<p>I second JHS's comments on Yale. In my somewhat outdated experience and from what I hear from current undergrads, intro language courses are where you are most likely to be taught by a TA. There are some TAs who teach intro math classes as well. I think freshman English courses may have changed from JHS's day. While they are likely to be taught by junior faculty, I don't think grad students are in the mix anymore. In my day, there was a competition at the grad school that allowed one grad student per semester to teach a class in the humanities. I took one of those classes my senior year and the women who taught it was amazing and has since gone on to a remarkable academic career. The existence of that competition led my to believe that courses in the humanities are almost never primarily taught by grad students; I certainly never heard of any class outside this competition that was.</p>
<p>As JHS states, TAs will be responsible for discussion sections in large lecture classes while a professor will actually teach the course and be available during office hours. The big lecture courses were some of the highlights of my college experience because the professors were tour de force performers, frequently earning standing ovations after lectures. Of course, I also had great seminars and small classes where the professor led the discussion sections.</p>
<p>My S's experience at Columbia is about the same as sac's S. The only difference is that he keeps, even as a senior, jumping into intro classes of things he's interested in, so he does have a couple larger classes (doing intro econ and intro oceanography just for the heck of it.) His econ teacher, by the way, is the president of the US soccer federation (meaningless fact department) and incredibly entertaining.</p>
<p>To add, though big classes have TA's, the profs all also hold office hours; i can't imagine they don't at any school.</p>
<p>At princeton, the larger classes will be taught by the professor, with smaller discussion sessions "precepts" sometimes taught by a ta who is a grad student. Each professor has to run atleast one precept of his class, and often other full professors will decide to precept a colleague's class. All math classes are taught by full professors, and I'm pretty sure that language ones are as well.</p>
<p>there are some math lab classes at UT-A, that is being taught by son's roommate from CMU. Dual major as undergrad, one is a Math masters, finished in the alotted 4 years undergrad study. Quite a hound, too. Some coeds are going to get major crushes.</p>
<p>My daughter is a freshman at Brown. She's in a freshman year seminar, capped at 20 students, taught by a professor. Her other three classes are between 50-100 students, with the lecture by a professor. Two of these have sections led by TAs. For one of the classes, she went to it just to see what it was like, and was spellbound by the professor's lecture. That's why she decided to take it.</p>
<p>The freshman seminars at Harvard have about 12 students. My daughter's world famous professor took the class to lunch at the end of the class.</p>
<p>Ec 10, as noted above, has about 1000 students. Greg Mankiw lectures five times during the semester. GADad's daughter was very fortunate to get a good TF. Not all are that good, and they do most of the teaching.</p>
<p>One interesting fact about Harvard is that the professors and TFs do not do the grading on many of the tests/papers including mid-terms (and there are two sets of mid-terms per semester - get that!) and finals. They actually hire graders who come in so that everyone is graded "fairly." It's an unusual concept, to say the least. </p>
<p>Expos (Freshman Writing) is taught by a Preceptor. Maybe someone else can explain that. I'm still trying to figure that one out myself!</p>
<p>^^What I heard is that expos teachers must be published authors (of something more than academic papers) and thus not necessarily professors. And "Preceptor" is just a fancy word for "teacher."</p>
<p>Harvard is big on a lot of old-fashioned job titles: Master, Preceptor, Proctor, etc. I surprised they don't have Legate, Tribune, and Archon ...or maybe they do.</p>
<p>DS is also doing a TA for ME/Engineering survey classes and equipment use. You don't need a prof to do that. His qualifications, BSME, BSHCI, from CMU, going for MSCS at non Ivy but international ranked school. He's more like a house cat. Sure hope someone will take him home.</p>
<p>I was a grader one year for Calculus. The TA was a friend of mine - he was a kid who'd gotten sophomore standing and was in his 4th year getting his masters. I don't even remember meeting the professor. The only qualifications I had was getting an A in Calculus. I think I did a good job though. I didn't just mark things right or wrong.</p>
<p>Many moons ago at Cornell (I was an undergrad engineer)</p>
<p>Who taught
* 95% of my lectures were taught by professors and 5% by lecturers and none by TAs.<br>
* On the other hand 95% of my recitation sessions were taught by TAs.<br>
* PS - I know the prof versus TA thing is often held out as a good/bad thing but in many fact based topics (tons of intro classes for example) I'm not so sure that is true ... in many cases my grad school TA was a MUCH better teacher than the prof.</p>
<p>Class Sizes
* Intro math/science/econ lectures ... 100-200 people
****** with recitation or lab groups of 15-25 people
* Intro writing classes ... 20 people
* Classes in my major ... 25-75 people
* Advanced and/or obscure electives ... 5-25 people
* Biggest class ... 1000+ people ... 20th century US History because the prof was simply amazing</p>
<p>My D is also a freshman at Brown. American Lit-- 58 (taught by Assist. Prof, plus smaller sections by TAs, I guess); French-- 23 (Prof); Advanced Studio Art-- 17 (Adjunct, but practicing artist); Freshman Seminar, as sly said, capped at 20 (Physics class taught by Prof).</p>
<p>Back 20 years ago as an engr student at Cornell,, my only seminar classes my first year were the freshman writing seminars by TAs. These were some of the better TAs I had. Other classes, math, compsci, chem, physics, intro engr, were all large lectures. But there were always plenty of seats if you wanted to be up close.. I also squatted in pscych 101 which had over 1000 official students, one of those legendary classes. </p>
<p>I did ok in this environment, but it definitely wouldn't work for my older D who is starting to look at colleges now. Her HS has 15 student classes in seminar style and she did a summer program at Exeter with their Harkness method. She caught the ear of the Chicago rep at a fair last night when he described their classes. Of the four colleges last night, I heard numbers like 80% of the classes were less than 20 students. To me, I wondered about the other 20% which I assume are mostly freshman and intro classes.</p>
<p>Some kids (like me) can do ok in this anonymous setup as a freshman, but for others I would think some more engaged process would be better. From what I remember from my sections in math/sci it was lab work and going over homework, again not engaging. The classes I had where I actually had to participate were the writing classes and a few humanity classes I took. But even in humanities, many were lecture style and not discussion based.</p>
<p>This may have changed in the past 20 years, can't say.</p>