Along with the enrollment increase at the University this year, students and faculty are seeing increases in their class sizes, and some say the higher numbers have put a damper on their classroom experience.
According to the University, the largest class size in 2000 peaked at 475 students in the fall. In one year, that number has moved past the 500-student mark — Sociology 204, for example, had 503 students fall term.
Senior Meghann McKinley has felt the effect of the enrollment increase and said her class sizes have grown.
“It’s usually the entry-level classes that are packed to the brim, but now I have noticed that even some of the upper-division classes that I assumed would be smaller and more personal seem to have gotten bigger,” McKinley said.
According to James Buch, associate vice president for enrollment management, the University has already taken steps to alleviate this problem.
“When it was realized several months ago that enrollment would increase in fall 2001, faculty and staff in academic departments made adjustments to class schedules and teaching assignments,” he said.
Buch said that departments maintained their enrollment levels by increasing the number of classes offered, and that larger lecture-formatted classes were increased in size to accommodate the rising number of students at the University.
“Professors teaching those courses made the adjustments knowing that they could effectively teach the course to a slightly larger number of students,” Buch said.
Despite these measures by the University, some students say problems arise from the larger class sizes. For McKinley, these classes make her feel more intimidated to ask questions or participate in classroom discussions.
Others have noticed a lack of facilities to accommodate all the students in their classes.
“At the beginning of (fall) term, if I didn’t get to one of my classes at least 10 minutes early, I sometimes would not be able to find a seat,” junior Kirsten Hamilton said of her sociology class. “If I did, the seat would be without a desktop, so I would be forced to write with my notebook on my lap.”
Large class sizes can also pose problems for faculty members. Jiannbin Lee Shiao, assistant professor of sociology, said that with class enrollment levels of 200 to 500 students, most instructors are forced to resort to multiple-choice exams.
Shiao said that if professors attempt to use a different method of evaluating student comprehension, it pushes a heavy workload on teachers as well as their graduate teaching fellows. He said that if his classes were smaller, it would allow him to alleviate his assistants’ workloads and give him time to write deeper and more constructive comments on his students’ papers.
Richard Emlet, associate professor of biology, shares this view, saying larger classrooms “create a distance between the teacher and student.” Emlet said classes with a higher volume of students limit contact and personal interaction between students and teachers. Moreover, he said, these large classes give both students and teachers the feeling of being “lost in a crowd.”
Finding ways of reaching everyone is also a dilemma for Joey Bargsten, a visiting assistant professor in the multimedia design program who teaches a class with more than 120 students. Bargsten said that in order to deal with these classes, teachers “need good standup material constantly.”
One way to solve these problems would be to hire more teachers, thereby decreasing class sizes, Shiao said.
“The only long-term solution is hiring more faculty — and specifically recruiting new faculty for the departments most (effected) by undergraduate enrollments,” he said. “Using new hires to equalize the wide-ranging student-to-faculty ratios between departments would probably go a long way to relieving current enrollment problems.”