Ivy Alumni and Current Ivy Parents: What's the Real Deal on Class Size and T.A.s?

Parents Forum
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<p>Thanks for your comments. Thanks for all the earlier comments in the thread. Someone asked for a summary of the thread. Remembering that I asked for a reality check on statements I see once in a while that "Ivy League" colleges have very large classes and lots of courses taught by T.A.s, given as a rationale for attending LACs or state university honors programs, I am confident, after reading this thread, that that concern is exaggerated. For the student who is admitted to one of the eight colleges that is genuinely in the Ivy League (or to one of the several research universities that are peers of those colleges), there are abundant opportunities to attend small classes with professors as early as freshman year, and a very high quality of teaching in many classes. All classes in all colleges offer various trade-offs, but there doesn't seem to be any systematic reason to avoid applying to Ivies just because a student likes small classes taught directly by professors, which was the thrust of my question.</p>

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<p>A lot of the courses at Harvard that are required for students who are planning on attending medical school for example are gigantic. I teach at a LAC and my students haven't had classes anywheres near to the size classes I'm hearing about at H.</p>

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<p>Tokenadult--that was a very reasonable, and helpful, summary. nice job!</p>

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<p>Tokenadult: Just to clarify, it truly depends upon the major and the level of the student's courses. An economics major at Harvard is going to have a lot of very (and i mean very!) large classes. As DocT says, so wll most pre-meds. You are unlikely to see that in a LAC.</p>

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<p>Whereas, a Classics or German major at Harvard or UC Berkeley is likely to have many small classes. But there is certainly a difference in environment for an undergraduate studying Classics at a liberal arts college, where there are no graduate students and the classes may be even smaller. Different is not necessarily better, but it is certainly different.</p>

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<p>I agree that at Harvard some classes are just humongous. Justice has passed the 1000+ mark. Ec 10 (aka Social Analysis 10) is also extremely large.
S currently has classes ranging from 15 to 77.
But in freshman year, students are required to take Expos (capped at 15) and have the option of taking a freshman seminar (capped at 12). Many upper level courses also have caps at 12 or 15.</p>

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<p>D reports that this semester in one of her classes the TA of the study section is a much better lecturer and teacher than is the professor who teaches the main section. She says but for the TA she would have dropped the course. So for all the flak they get, TAs are sometimes the key to success.</p>

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<p>mamenyu:</p>

<p>S is taking two courses in which i/3 are graduate students. There are many such classes at Harvard (at some other universities, some of the courses might be labeled advanced undergraduate courses). He does not think the presence of graduate students upsets the balance of the courses.</p>

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<p>I imagine it can be stimulating for an undergraduate to be in a class with graduate students, although in a lecture course it may not be that much of a difference. When I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, there were some classes that had both graduate and undergraduate students -- the professors graded the graduate student papers; readers graded the undergraduates (the readers were graduate students -- not the ones taking the class, of course!) I don't know if it is the same at Harvard. From the perspective of the student, it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference if the reader is fair. My only point was that it is different, not that it is necessarily worse.</p>

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<p>A while back, I went thru the Common Data Sets of the USNWR Top 30 national universities. Many were not available or I had difficulty locating them-Harvard, Caltech, U Penn, Duke, U Chicago, Columbia, Wash U, Brown, J Hopkins, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Tufts, and Wake Forest. But the rest were available and I looked closely at their class size data, particularly those related to Class Sections and Class Sub-sections. (Princeton and UC Berkeley appeared to be way out of whack and I conclude that there must be a difference in reporting so I won’t include them.) </p>

<p>Here is the detail that I found:</p>

<p>Yale
1242 Class Sections (100% of total)
0 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Dartmouth
523 Class Sections (100% of total)
0 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Cornell
2274 (65% of total)
1211 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Stanford
1396 Class Sections (66% of total)
766 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>MIT
897 Class Sections (79% of total)
232 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Northwestern
1608 Class Sections (75% of total)
542 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Rice
679 Class Sections (100% of total)
0 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Emory
1531 Class Sections (99% of total)
18 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Vanderbilt
1375 Class Sections (90% of total)
145 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>Carnegie Mellon
2471 Class Sections (86% of total)
401 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>U Virginia
1889 Class Sections (62% of total)
1141 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>U Michigan
3195 Class Sections (55% of total)
2567 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>UCLA
1891 Class Sections (46% of total)
2236 Class Sub-sections</p>

<p>U North Carolina
2510 Class Sections (75% of total)
856 Class Sub-sections</p>

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<p>Hawkette:</p>

<p>By class sections, I understand is meant individual classes? How are class subsections counted?</p>

<p>For example, in a class such as Justice at Harvard, which has over 1000 students, there must be around 60 sections (each being capped at 18). So a few such monster classes at a college would account for a very high proportion of the total number of subsections, but that might not be reflective of the experience of students who would avoid the monster classes. </p>

<p>Harvard claims that 70% of the classes it offers have fewer than 20 students, but that 70% of students take classes with more than 20 students. But that statement does not give a true feel for the experience of sstudents as there is a huge (pun intended) difference between attending a class with 24 other students and attending one with 999 others.</p>

<p>The two classes S shares with graduate students have 20 or fewer. I'm not sure how the grading is handled.</p>

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<p>I took a couple of graduate/undergrad courses where there were extra requirements for the grad students, usually an extra paper to write and other courses where there was no difference at all.</p>

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<p>marite,
I think that there are some differences with how some schools report this data, so I'm not sure how to answer your question. If you have a minute, look at the Class Section/Class Sub-section information for Princeton and UC Berkeley and you will see what I mean.</p>

<p>As for the USNWR class size data, they use the Class Sections data only.</p>

<p>My personal interpretation of the data is that the Class Section data probably relates to those classes taught by professors while the Class Sub-section data would likely involve a TA or some other small discussion coordinator. Given the patterns in the data that I posted, this seems logical to me. Larger schools have larger sections and do more teaching with TAs. </p>

<p>For the specific example you cite, I think that if the Justice class meets at one time as a group of 1000 and then has 60 breakout classes, then it is considered as one Class Section and 60 Class Sub-sections. If it is one course that is taught to 1000 students across 60 sections, then this would be 60 Class Sections. I'm not sure if this is correct and perhaps someone else will have a better understanding of how the CDS reports this information.</p>

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<p>Thanks, Hawkette.</p>

<p>If we look at the description of Justice, it meets twice a week and has a weekly section. It's pretty standard at Harvard for lecture classes (I'm not talking about Ec 10 which seems like a different kind of animal which I have not really figured out). Sections are capped at 18, so for Justice, students meet twice per week en masse in Sanders Theater; once a week they meet in 60 or so discrete sections at different times and different location.
It is pretty much the same as lecture courses that have more than 20 students and are thus allowed to have two sections. But for reporting purposes, adding together one class of 1000 and one class of 20, and adding together 60 sections of one course and 2 of another just does not give the real flavor of a student's experience. S, for example, has no interest in taking the Justice course. He has expressed an interest in taking a very popular course, so he may end up in another class with several hundred students. But if he changes his mind, there are other with much smaller enrollments he could take to fulfill that requirement.</p>

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<p>What's up with Ec10?? D is taking this course and orgo - both of which have huge classes. However it is my understanding that for Ec 10, the professor rarely teaches the class and it is handled mainly by TA's or TF's. Is this what I'm paying $48000 a year for?</p>

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<p>My understanding--and it is second hand--is that the prof controls the syllabus and meets regularly with the TFs. These are advanced graduate students. Larry Summers was once a TF in Ec 10. It is run differently from Justice in which Michael Sandel lectures twice a week.</p>

<p>Is your D unhappy at the structure of Ec10 (apart from the tuition angle?)</p>

<p>Orgo is also a huge course everywhere, as it is a weed out course for pre-med. I don't know about Harvard, but S's friend over at MIT was orgo CA (undergraduate course assistant) in his sophomore year as he'd aced it in his freshman year.</p>

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<p>No not necessarily unhappy. Besides the issue with this course, there are also problems with her "advisor", a medical student who has since decided that he doesn't want to advise and has left a number of students without anybody. Since she is a sophomore, it is my understanding that she will be assigned a concentration advisor at the end of this semester. However she had to figure out what courses to take this semester - not a trivial task for a premed, neurobiology concentrator with an economics minor.</p>

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<p>DocT, I sent you a PM.</p>

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<p>^^Advising continues to be Harvard's biggest weakness IMO.</p>

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<p>The EC 10 professor, Greg Mankiw, lectures five (yes, only 5) times during the semester. Beyond that, TFs teach the sections. The TF who is the head of the other TFs (don't know his name) is apparently the "one to get." However, there is no choice involved in the sectioning. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to change TFs - even if one continues onto the second semester. (You do not have to take both semesters of Ec 10 - micro and micro - both most do.)</p>

<p>Mankiw does hold office hours and attempts to get students to stop by; I don't know that many do or how much is accomplished there.</p>

<p>DocT - another thing to be aware of is that year long courses (i.e. two semester courses) are graded by averaging the two semester grades. Thus, if a student does very well the first semester and not as well the second semester, the final grade (for transcript GPA) will be lower. Both individual grades still stand on the transcript though, but not in terms of the average. Of course that can work both ways; doing better the second semester will help the final grade in the course.</p>

<p>I'd have to say that I find this fairer than the system at my son's LAC, where a two semester grade is determined by the second semester's final grade - the first semester's grade does not even matter in terms of GPA. What gives with that???</p>

<p>Ec 10 is such an institution at Harvard that it has its own office and office staff.</p>

<p>Justice, with its 1000+ students, is apparently still so desired that it's difficult to get into. (At least that's what I've heard; my kid has not tried.)</p>

<p>And I agree, advising is the weakest link at Harvard. Doesn't hold a candle to the advising at my other kid's LAC.</p>