Liberal Arts College = More writing than state u?

[mikemac]

<p>

@tk21769 writes: UCLA (USNWR #23 university) has an S:F ratio of 17:1; 50% of its classes have < 20 students.

That class size statistic is very misleading because it weighs a class with 20 students the same as a class with many more students, even though many more students will experience the larger size since it holds more. To give a contrived example, suppose TinyU has 4 classes of 250 students and 4 classes of 10 students. Just about everyone at TinyU is in a class of 250, yet TinyU can proudly say that 50% of its classes have 10 students or less.</p>

<p>To show what this means for UCLA, there are around 28,000 undergrads. If each student takes 4 classes, then UCLA must provide 112,000 classroom seats every quarter. Looking at the UCLA Common Data Set there are 480 classes with 2-9 students and 564 classes with 10-19. Even if we put as many kids as possible in each of these small classes, the UCLA classes with 19 students or less only provide 15,000 classroom seats. Since UCLA needs 112,000 seats it is clear that the experience of 50% of the students is not a class with 20 students or less.</p>

[tk21769]

<p>^Yes. Although, your “480” and “564” count only the sections, not the subsections.
UCLA also has 330 subsections of 2-9 students with undergraduates enrolled, and 866 with 10-19.</p>

[jelly765]

<p>I was thinking about applying to Amherst. Would they give a lot of writing assignments?</p>

[mikemac]

<p>

@tk21769 writes: ^Yes. Although, your “480” and “564” count only the sections, not the subsections.
UCLA also has 330 subsections of 2-9 students with undergraduates enrolled, and 866 with 10-19.

Intentional omission. The “subsections” are probably just 1-unit labs.</p>

<p>The actual number of small classes taught by profs are in the numbers I gave (although a few small classes, such as the required freshman comp class, are taught by TAs and no doubt are included in those numbers) . </p>

[mikemac]

<p>Again regarding those subsections, it is possible UCLA misread the Common Data Set instructions.

Class Subsections: A class subsection includes any subsection of a course, such as laboratory, recitation, and discussion subsections that are supplementary in nature and are scheduled to meet separately from the lecture portion of the course. Undergraduate subsections are defined as any subsections of courses in which degree-seeking undergraduate students enrolled for credit. As above, exclude noncredit classes and individual instruction such as dissertation or thesis research, music instruction, or one-to-one readings.

They should not have counted the discussion sections that are required as part of a larger lecture class but do not carry any units. I just went and looked at the Cal and UCSD Common Data Sets and they do not report anything for Class Subsection, so I wonder if UCLA just made a mistake here?</p>

[tk21769]

<p>I don’t interpret it as a mistake to count discussion subsections.
Consider UCLA’s History 1A course (Western Civ).
It includes one 50 minute, 3x/week lecture that enrolls 229 students this Fall.
It also includes 14 discussion sections, each enrolling 6-20 students (totaling 229) and meeting 1x/week for 50 minutes. The 14 discussion sections should be counted as subsections, according to these CDS instructions:

For example, a lecture class with 800 students who met at another time in 40 separate labs with 20 students should be counted once in the 100+ column in the class section column and 40 times under the 20-29 column of the class subsections table.

</p>

<p>It appears that 5 TAs (grad students/lecturers) lead these 15 subsections. So on average, each would be responsible for grading ~46 students’ papers and exams.</p>

<p>Compare Macalester’s History 101 course (Intro to European History). It has one 90 minute, 2X/week class that enrolls a maximum of 25 students, taught by a single professor who received a PhD from UChicago in 2012.</p>

[MYOS1634]

<p>I often found that office hours with a TA is NOT the same thing as office hours with the course professor, unless the TA is in charge of designing the exams, made the syllabus, controls more than the break out sessions, and is, essentially, the class’ main instructor.
@Therearellamas: a 150 class will have 2 TAs (perhaps 3), not 5. And TAs don’t necessarily grade papers. While some lectures have graders, TAs would typically only grade the midterms’/Tests’ essay question, the rest of the test being scantron multiple choice or grid-in.</p>

[barrons]

<p>Any school that has large contingents of eng, hard science, CS, business, ag, and similar majors will not have the same writing intensity of a school with mostly English, history, and poli sci majors. Doing problem sets and labs are more typical. As the NSSE does not break out responses by major it’s useless for this type of comparison.</p>

[marysidney]

<p>Yes, a simple comparison of teacher-student ratio should give you a sense of how much writing is required for a course. Reading a paper and commenting in depth takes more time than most people imagine; it simply cannot be done for a large course. There must either be a choice that papers are not required, or TAs will do the work the prof cannot. TAs are not necessarily bad, of course; I was a TA once, long ago; but it’s not the same as having the professor who leads the discussion grade the papers. But don’t assume that classes are the same across the school, either: there are some courses that are readily taught in large format, that offset smaller classes. You need to do the research to find out what the schools you like are like.</p>