<p>All large classes will be subdivided into smaller sections of 15-30 students. Thus, you will meet for 3 hours per week in a large lecture hall with the professor, and then 1-2 hours a week in your smaller section. The sections are lead by PhD candidates... who are all very smart, but vary wildly in teaching quality... again, they were selected on their research potential... their teaching skills are an afterthought... some will be phenomenal, others mediocre... </p>
<p>The sections are a mixed bag... in the sciences, generally they just cover homework problem solving strategies... a good Teaching Fellow can make all the difference. In the social sciences & humanities, you will discuss a few key issues in greater depth. Again, an excellent teaching fellow can help facilitate a great dialogue that elucidates the topics at hand... on the other hand, some sections just devolve into students trying to jockey for position, showing-off, and brown-nosing the teaching fellow... when I was at Harvard, this was called "flexing."</p>
<p>In a lot of discussions about class size, here and elsewhere, there's the implicit assumption that small is good and large is bad. Well, to borrow from Gershwin, tain't necessarily so. Like most things, it depends.</p>
<p>Last year, when my son was deciding between Harvard and some fine LACs, I had this sort of kneejerk anti-large bias myself. But then my son decided on Harvard, and this fall he enrolled in one of Harvard's very largest (maybe the largest) undergraduate classes: Michael Sandel's Justice. Talk about large; there were, I think, over 1,000 students. But, according to my son, it was magnificent. Why? Because not only was the reading deeply engrossing (Aristotle, Kant, Mill, etc., etc.), but Sandel is, apparently, just an absolutely wonderful and brilliant teacher.</p>
<p>So the lesson here, at least for me, is simple enough: good is good (and bad is bad), small or large.</p>
<p>Relative to small LAC's, Harvard shares all the disadvantages of any large research university: faculty who are hired and promosed based almost entirely on scholarship rather than on teaching; larger classes; discussion sections run by graduate students rather than professors (if there's a 60-person lecture at an LAC, there are still 6 discussion sections; the prof just runs and attends all of them every week), etc. Otherwise the major disadvantage is that some people will defensively assume that you're an stuck-up *******.</p>
<p>if there's a 60-person lecture at an LAC, there are still 6 discussion sections; the prof just runs and attends all of them every week</p>
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<p>This is totally untrue at Bryn Mawr and Haverford. If this is true at a particular school you know about, you need to confine the statement to "This is the pattern at XYZ College," not "this is the pattern at LACs."</p>
<p>At the top LACs, yes, research is important... but the split is roughly 50% research, 50% teaching in the hiring & tenure process.
At the research universities, it is 90% research, 10% teaching.</p>
<p>At the top LACs, professors MUST do excellent research AND excellent teaching... if you lack one or the other, you will not get hired, or get tenure. At the research universities, they give lip-service to teaching, but it really doesn't enter into the decision in any significant way.</p>
<p>I've applied to jobs at both research universities AND LACs... right now, I prefer LACs... I really like the balanced approach to teaching and research... I think it makes for a better quality of life as a professor, for me personally...</p>
<p>Just a note--not all sections are lead by PhD candidates. In some fields, having a grad student as a section leader is the exception rather than the rule. I've seen TFs who are sophomores, TFs who are law students, TFs who are professional yoga instructors...the profs can hire pretty much whoever they want, as long as the candidates are qualified. Sometimes you do run into problems with very large classes when the prof. can't hire enough qualified TFs; this happened to me in an oversubscribed Shakespeare class when my TF was pulled from another department (History and Literature with a focus on 19th century France, I think) and confessed to knowing very little about Shakespeare. I switched sections.</p>
<p>One of the advantages of large classes that people don't always think about is the broad selection of classes and the fact that you're generally able to get into the courses you want or need. I have a friend at a LAC who's taking introductory Latin to fulfill her language requirement--even though she took three years of Latin in high school and hated it--because it was the only language course she could get into.</p>
<p>Epistrophy makes an excellent point about course quality and class size: good quality trumps small size. Top notch large classes can be great: Justice is an excellent example.</p>
<p>A good friend is a recent graduate of Yale, where class sizes are on average a bit smaller than at Harvard. Her complaint was that making them smaller meant capping many good, high-demand classes at levels that excluded a large number of eager learners. They would have to come back another semester.</p>