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<p>As a practical matter at Swarthmore, you pick your main courses for junior and senior year when you submit your plan for your major(s) and minor(s) at the end of the sophmore year and write your sophmore paper with your faculty advisor. You already know what courses will be offered for the next two years. The challenge is not finding 16 more courses, but cutting down to just 16 courses to take. And, for saavy students, the decisions are really about which professors to take more than which courses. You are required to take 20 courses outside your major, so that puts a limit of 12 courses in your major (for an average load of 32 courses), so it’s not like you can take two electives every semester.</p>
<p>In most majors, it would be folly to offer every course every year. There wouldn’t be enough students to fill the courses and it’s not a case where juniors and seniors are getting shut out of courses.</p>
<p>So, putting the electives on a two-year rotation doubles the number of options for the students and keeps the faculty teaching them from going stir-crazy teaching the same course year after year after year. </p>
<p>The total number of couse sections available in a given semester is determined by the ratio of teaching faculty to students. For a given ratio, the only way to offer more elective courses in a semester is to increase the class sizes for a number of other courses. It’s not like big universities with a lot of electives have more teaching faculty for every ten students. There’s no free lunch here.</p>
<p>There are occasional students who will run out of courses at a school like Swarthmore. For example, if you’ve already taken four or more semesters of college math in high school, then you will probably need access to grad school courses as a math major. You might be able to do that at Swarthmore with the honors seminars (which are really chef’s choice topics each year) and directed reading courses (one on one with a prof). Or, in your meetings with the faculty while college hunting (as anyone in that situation should be doing), they might tell you you need to go to a larger university. That’s a pretty atypical situation, but it happens – sometimes in math, sometimes in languages. For the most part, very few students graduate from Swarthmore feeling like they haven’t been adequately challenged.</p>