<p>I'm wondering what some students' experiences with class sizes at Columbia have been. Columbia likes to boast their class sizes, but I know what's advertised isn't always the reality.</p>
<p>Core classes are capped. Lit Hum and CC are capped at 22 students, while Music and Art Hum are capped at 25 (I think). A fair number of professors teach Lit Hum and CC, while there are more grad students teaching Music/Art Hum. So you will get an intimate class setting for your Core classes. (I’m not talking about Major Cultures, which doesn’t require any specific classes.) </p>
<p>Everything else really varies. Science lectures tend to be pretty big, but that’s standard at most schools, and I’ve never found that to interfere with learning. My English lectures usually have 30-40 people. The biggest humanities lecture I’ve taken had 86 people in it, but there are some really popular classes that have more people. Seminars are capped at 16-20 people (I think it depends on the department and sometimes on the professor). </p>
<p>While it’s always nice to have smaller classes, I didn’t give much thought to the student-to-professor ratio after I got into college. I never ended up not taking a class because it was too big, and even in my biggest science classes, my professors end up knowing me (since I go to office hours pretty frequently).</p>
<p>Yes, I would say there are just as many positives to taking a large class as to taking a small one.</p>
<p>I think that class size is one of the worst indicators one can use to evaluate colleges. I care about quality. Some professors thrive doing lectures whereas others like discussion.</p>
<p>Core classes are small, intro classes are large, and more advanced classes shrink as you go up.
This semester for me
Contemporary Civilizations - ~18 kids
Music hum - ~20 kids
ArtHum - ~20 kids
Calc 2 ~40-50 kids
Intro Econ ~300 kids
Foreign Language ~19 kids</p>
<p>echo fastfood - this is the truth.</p>
<p>i think the thing to note then is i found columbia to have high quality of teaching. the reason i chose columbia, actually, over LACs and peer schools was because after visiting on some classes i was shocked by some of the poor teaching out there, but highly impressed at columbia. i would say i had a handful of bad experiences in the 40+ classes i had. and the classes that i had a bad lecture it was made up usually be a great discussion class (foner). i had only one really bad class, but it was so bad, and surreal, i have a story for the rest of my life. and the rest of the classes were from very good to sublime. i really enjoyed that aspect of academic life, i really got the sense that profs wanted to teach, and took their task seriously. and that includes being in a class with a big wig like Robert Jervis, who sat down with me for over an hour in office hours. or the current dean of sipa that opened up his time for me. i think that is a special part of columbia.</p>
<p>to current students, as i know there are many. take a moment to sit back and really think about how your profs have prepared for class or lecture, and their attempt to really push you into new situations. if you need any recommendations for classes - i have a bunch of them.</p>
<p>I haven’t been in a class yet with more than 100 people, but I was in two classes this semester with more than 50. Basically, large introductory type courses in popular majors will usually attract large numbers, varying based on if these courses are required, or if they’re prerequisites for something, etc. Specifically in the English department, lectures that assume no prior experience with very popular topics tend to be in the 50-100 people range (Shakespeare I and II, Modern Poetry, Romantic Poetry, probably modern novel classes as well), but for almost all of those topics, there’s a more focused seminar-style class that is about the same general material (make focus in on a smaller number of writers or some such), and these are usually capped between 10 and 20.</p>
<p>Outside of the large introductory classes, numbers are much smaller, and even in those large courses, there are often discussion sections/recitations that narrow down the numbers.</p>
<p>Also, to echo some of the other people in this thread, I got just as much out of my large lectures as I did out of my small discussion-based classes, with the exception of LitHum, but that’s because my LitHum professor was a god.</p>
<p>^^ sounds like someone had Mark Lilla</p>
<p>OP: Use this instead of listening to random opinions:</p>
<p>[Columbia</a> College Bulletin | Columbia College](<a href=“http://www.college.columbia.edu/bulletin]Columbia”>Columbia College Bulletin < Columbia College | Columbia University)</p>
<p>the size of every class is listed there if you click on the department in questions (i.e. Psychology) and then click on the tab that says course listings.</p>
<p>fin.</p>