<p>How are large classes handled at Brown. I heard that some classes have as many as 200 people and that the Professor will hold smaller review classes with groups of 10-20 students every week. How does this really work as It’s hard to believe a Prof will hold 10 extra review sessions every week for a large lecture class. At most schools these smaller sections are run by TAs not Profs.</p>
<p>Which classes at Brown have over 100 students in a lecture format?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Numerous classes are lecture classes of that size, too many to name (many econ classes, lower level CS classes, science classes, some applied math classes, City Politics just to start). Some classes are larger than 200 as well (which is why it’s best to choose a balance of courses). Some of these courses break down into (optional or mandatory) sections with TAs but most do not. I’ve never heard of a professor running more than 1 section and even this is very uncommon. In CS, it’s not even too uncommon for the TAs to lecture…</p>
<p>I’ve taken a good number of larger classes including ones on the Chem, Bio, and Psych departments. In my experience, most professors break down into review sessions (some optional, some mandatory) with TAs leading the sessions. However, they have all been very receptive to students seeking extra help during office hours, so you can still get the one-on-one contact. </p>
<p>I’d also like to point out that for the majority of my classes, the TAs have been fellow undergrads. It’s great to have that contact and know that I too have the opportunity to TA for my fellow classmates.</p>
<p>Two things:</p>
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<li><p>While there are classes with 200+ people, there aren’t a whole lot of them. There are plenty of classes with less than 50 people, many with less than 20. Most intro courses are probably 60-80 people. In those cases, yes, there will be sections, and yes, they will probably be led by TAs. Usually the TAs are grad students, but sometimes they are undergrads. It doesn’t mean they are bad/incompetent. I’ve had TAs whose abilities supersede the professor’s.</p></li>
<li><p>Different professors will handle sections differently. I took an excellent course freshman year where we had lecture for an hour and then section for the last 30 minutes of the class. TAs facilitated the sections, and the professor moved between them, observing and offering her insights.</p></li>
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<p>That being said, I didn’t have any classes with more than 20 students this year, and my department is pretty big.</p>
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<p>That makes much more sense and is consistent with other schools. It’s odd that the admission folks were insisting that the profs did all the review sessions even after being questioned on this by several people in the audience.</p>
<p>The Tour Guides definitely tell everyone that all classes of that size are required to break down…it wouldn’t surprise me if professors are actually required to but not everyone does - after all, many departments break the rules on what undergrad TAs are allowed to do, after all.</p>
<p>However, I must argue that there are a decent number of classes of over 100 students that do not break down into sections (I was the head TA for one last term).</p>
<p>Wow, Uroogla. I really thought all large classes broke down into sections. Granted I went to Brown years ago, but all my large classes had sections (although I think I had a couple classes with 30-50 students that didn’t break into sections). And I’m pretty sure every large lecture class my daughter took had sections. Which ones don’t?</p>
<p>I did have one professor back in the day who led every single section. He was an amazing guy and very popular prof. All my TAs (and I believe my daughter’s, too) were grad students. </p>
<p>The large classes are almost always intro courses. Some of them are incredible classes. Sometimes a brilliant professor can be a mesmerizing and inspiring lecturer – and you can learn more by listening to him/her speak than discussions around a seminar table.</p>
<p>Apart from CS16, the large CS classes do not break into sections (4, 15, 17, 18, 22, 31, 157 this year). Some of them have labs, some do not, which you may consider to be similar, though all of my CS classes with labs did not require us to attend the actual lab, just do the work for it and get it checked off during TA hours. 31 offered a single optional review session a week because I felt it was a good idea, but it was not required and the size wasn’t capped - some reached 50 people for a class of about 120.</p>
<p>A number of the applied math classes exceed this size and offer 1 informal optional review session a week (120 and 165, for instance, though I suspect that this depends on the professor).</p>
<p>The math department is good about having sections for their large (100+) classes. Econ seems to as well.</p>
<p>If we reduce the size in question from 100 to 50, this now includes many intermediate math courses and any classics course that exceeds that size (normally only history and mythology), as far as courses I’m aware of. I couldn’t begin to guess about courses like abnormal psychology (upper level psych class that’s generally over 100) or mid-level science classes, but there are definitely classes in multiple departments that don’t break into sections anything like the ones mentioned, TA-led or otherwise.</p>
<p>Another thing to consider is that in some of those large classes, (econ, poli sci that I’ve attended in the last few years) while the enrollment might be 100-150, often only 2/3 to half of the students will show up to class!! (except for review for exam classes etc) So there is actually more opportunity for those who do want to get the most out of their education by going to class to interact/ask questions etc. I think in the STEM large classes, a higher percentage of students attend classes.</p>
<p>My daughter ('09) TA’d 4 classes as an undergrad, including running the lab sections for CS 17/18. She told me the CS dept is super organized and the TA system works very well. She always had high regard for her TA’s.</p>
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<p>No offense to your daughter who I’m sure is great but I have an issue with paying $50K a year and having a lot of undergrad TAs. What are the professors doing and why don’t they do more of the sections versus delegating? I had heard Harvard/Yale/Columbia had a lot of TA-driven teaching but I though Brown was more undergrad focused.</p>
<p>Brown is more undergrad focused. You will have pretty much all of your classes taught by professors, who will also be much more available to the students outside of class than those concentrating on their graduate students at other schools. Undergrad TA’s tend to TA because they really enjoy that class, and know the actual material better than gradstudents at other places who may be farther removed from that material, and sometimes are “just doing it to get their money”. Of course not everyone fits those stereotypes, but you should not be afraid of undergrad TAs.</p>
<p>I know chem 33 and bio 20 do not break down into sections. We have lab, but that’s facilitated by a completely different professor and then broken down once again into lab with TAs (who really are no helpful at all). I had a section with my professor once in an intro religious studies class and was WONDERFUL!!! I would say most sections are run by graduate TAs. I actually have a graduate student as my professor this summer and they’re normally very good teachers. Better than I would’ve originally thought. Granted, the department of which the class you’re in will generally tell you how good the grad students are.</p>
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<p>I’m a huge fan of the undergraduate TA system in the CS dept. The TA’s aren’t doing something that the professor could do their main purpose is often to provide one-on-one help for students at TA hours when they’re coding. And in big classes the demand for one-on-one help couldn’t be met by one professor, so it often requires an army of TAs. Furthermore I tend to be very impressed with the undergrad CS TAs, and I don’t think that having graduate students instead would improve the quality of TAing. But most importantly, I like the TA program because you might get to <em>become</em> a TA (which I did last semester and will do again in the fall). TAing a class is a really great learning experience and I’m really glad I’ve had that opportunity.</p>
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In the intro courses, this is correct, and the UTA system works exceptionally well for those courses. It’s not a perfect system, but there aren’t complaints about the TA system for those courses.</p>
<p>For upper level courses (and even intermediate courses), it tends to be different, though - developing assignments should be the professor’s task, not the TAs’, and under no circumstances should an undergrad be grading a PhD candidate’s work. The university’s UTA standards pretty much limit them to running a section and grading multiple choice questions. The CS department exceeds this substantially (subjective grading, some TAs give lectures, developing assignments) and pays less than other departments, admittedly with the blessing of the university. I too served as an undergrad TA for 4 semesters (a head TA for 2 of those), and I really found there to be a huge difference between lower level and upper level courses.</p>
<p>The difference, of course, is that in most classes, assignments aren’t graded automatically, and so an army of graders is needed, and (under the CS15 model, at least) a massive amount of office hours are needed. The department has a small grad program, so grad TAs won’t work under this model.</p>
<p>Most other departments limit the undergrad TA interaction - there’s nothing wrong with having an undergrad who’s done well in a class grade multiple choice questions, or even leading a (scripted) review session a week, and in some cases, due to Brown’s unique way of teaching some courses, undergrads who have taken a class will make better TAs for it than graduate students who have taken a very different class. It’s just a few situations in which I find it frustrating (and even then, the students tend to look up to most of the TAs in the CS department).</p>
<p>One upper division class she TA’d (because she wanted to sit in on it again) was only 12 students, so they had very good access to both a TA and the Prof. I don’t think having TA’s run lab sections and hold office hours is a negative. The TA’s are vetted and it is a selective process.</p>
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<p>It sounds like TAs, both graduate and undergraduate, are the norm at Brown. I have mixed feelings about classes being taught by TAs instead of profs, but I’m really upset that this was misrepresented in the information session. To insist that all classes are broken-down and sections taught by profs is dishonest when this is clearly not the case.</p>
<p>Here’s what you’re missing: classes are <em>not</em> taught by TAs. The TAs are there to facilitate extra problem sessions and sections where you do more discussion (depending on the material). In my experience, TAs do not teach new material; instead, they help you understand the material that’s already been presented. I’m a fan of this strategy.</p>
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<p>The admissions staff was asked several times to clarify and still insisted that professors, not TAs, lead the recitation sections and the example was a large class with multiple break-out sessions. This is clearly misleading.</p>
<p>The official statement on undergrad TAs can be found here: <a href=“http://brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/faculty/documents/UTA_Guidelines.pdf[/url]”>http://brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/faculty/documents/UTA_Guidelines.pdf</a></p>
<p>If the admissions officers did say that, then I agree that it was misleading, as it is simply untrue (and TA-lead sections are clearly permitted by the faculty handbook).</p>
<p>I have recently looked into how other top computer science departments function without as many undergrad TAs as Brown’s has (or with none at all). For the most part, their grading is automated, which requires a massive infrastructure and enough supervision to be sure grades are being assigned correctly. There is a movement in the department in that direction for a number of courses, but it’s too early to say how effective it’ll be, and the TA program continues to grow rather than shrink.</p>