<p>I couldn’t disagree more. You should be able to get to know a professor well enough in a single semester that they can write you a terrific, detailed, highly personalized recommendation letter. If not, something is wrong. And as a pedagogical matter, it’s always better to be challenged by more professors, who think about things in different ways, use different methodologies, bring different insights to bear, even if operating within the same discipline. I always tell my students that if you take three classes from me, it’s probably too much, you’re stifling your intellectual development. Two is fine; three is almost always too much.</p>
<p>How much more are they really going to be able to say about you after the 3rd or 4th time they’ve had you as a student? Plus, if you’re getting a recommendation from somebody that’s not very well know, I’d imagine it would necessarily have to be glowing if you wanted to get into one of the very top schools.</p>
<p>True. But I would say–logically, too–that class sizes and level of faculty attention are highly correlated. ND is substantially behind Stanford in terms of # classes under 20–there’s a ~20% difference. Yet it manages to be more than 20% ahead in this “faculty attention” survey? I would think it would be more comparable, at best.</p>
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<p>Er, that’s pretty much how it is at Stanford, Harvard, etc. too. Heck, that’s how it is for most top schools (and to a lesser extent at others). But at a school like Stanford, you’ll find that many of the courses that ND makes large are small.</p>