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I went to a small state college. My smallest class was 3 students. One of the students seldom showed up, so it was mostly this other guy (a friend of mine) and I. I had heard of a recent instance of a class only having 1 student.
My biggest class was about 75-100 students.
At my college (at least in my major), if a class is under 40 enrolled, they either cancel it or merge it with another section.
Some of the upper division classes are still pushing 120 or more students.
My son's calculus classes were usually cut in half mid way through the session.
Wow. My college seems to do everything possible to keep people in their classes instead of failing them. Curves, extra credit, make up tests....I saw this even in the calculus class that was before my class in the lecture hall last semester.
Wow. My college seems to do everything possible to keep people in their classes instead of failing them. Curves, extra credit, make up tests....I saw this even in the calculus class that was before my class in the lecture hall last semester.
I think that it has more to do with students dropping the class than teachers failing them, although the ones who drop tend to be the ones getting the low grades -usually because they want to maintain their GPA. But I also know students who drop courses because they just do not like the class or subject, the course is moving at a pace that they are not comfortable with (too fast, too slow), they are bored, the course turned out to be different than they expected, didn't like the teacher, etc.
I have heard teachers try to verbally convince students to stick it out, maybe going as far as offering some one-on-one time to help them through, but I have never heard of a teacher offering anything else to entice a student to stick around. At the end of the day the teacher still gets paid the same.
Wow. My college seems to do everything possible to keep people in their classes instead of failing them. Curves, extra credit, make up tests....I saw this even in the calculus class that was before my class in the lecture hall last semester.
Many Colleges just don't give a flying crap. I know of several classes at my College where they fail up to 60% every semester ( even in junior classes). They probably look at it this way... failed student taking it again = more money.
My son's Anthropology class went over 40 people to 14 over the course of the semester.
My accounting class went from 20 to 10.
Both of these were at a CA community college.
My daugter goes to a popular CSU and her lower division GE classes were always 60+ with some lectures over 200, but now her upper division major classes can be as small as 20.
Before I graduated my largest class was 35 and my smallest was 9. We only had about 2600 students...about 1500 "traditional" students, 1000 Continuing Education (adult) students and 100 "early college" students (high school students taking college courses).
Last edited by Randomstudent; 12-10-2009 at 07:24 PM..
My son's Anthropology class went over 40 people to 14 over the course of the semester.
My accounting class went from 20 to 10.
Both of these were at a CA community college.
I saw that when I attended a real estate class at a NC community college. We went from 26 students at the start to 7 who passed the final exam.
Just curious how class sizes are where y'all went/are going to college.
Usually the classes get smaller the farther into college you get. Say from about 100 in freshman lecture halls down to 15 or so by upper level classes. Or at least that's what it does in most colleges across the country. That's what I've heard.
I however am in the illustrious State University System of Florida. The freshamn classes were about 400. By sophmoroe year I was down to 250-300 for most classes. Junior year is about 150 or so, plus a couple online class. However, I will never have a course with less than 75 people in it before I graduate.
I know another college in the University System had something like 1,200 people in the lecture hall for a particular class. One of the reasons I steered clear of that school.
How is it at your college/alma mater?
Hah, you must be referring to FSU's "Bio for non-majors" aka "Baby Bio" class. Actually wasn't too bad given the point was just to have a non-rigorous course to meet the general ed science requirement.
I know at FSU the norm was 50-60 kids. In grad school right now the max a class can have is 20, and I've had as few as 6. I really haven't seen a difference in educational quality, really depends on if the teacher is one who engages with the class or just talks the whole time.
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