cornell engineering vs michigan vs berkeley

[ucbalumnus]

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@Truust

BUT, several of Cal’s upper division courses, at least for my major, have 200+ students. That can be a really impersonal experience for some people imo. (I should point out to the OP though that there are discussion sections for each class of ~25 students so it’s not as big of a problem) I’d imagine that Cornell’s upper division courses for the most part DO NOT go to such high sizes. But I could be wrong since I haven’t looked at Cornell’s upper division courses specifically.

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<p>If your major is CS, you are likely to find relatively large classes at any school with a well known CS department. CS enrollment has been exploding over the past several years.</p>

<p><a href=“http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/courses/roster/FA14/CS/”>http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/courses/roster/FA14/CS/&lt;/a&gt; lists upper division CS courses with 10 or so labs. Although the size of each lab is not listed, one can estimate the range of class size based on the range of lab size. However, most Cornell upper division CS courses do not have labs or discussions, so estimating their sizes this way does not work (although if you know a Cornell student who can tell you the size of each classroom listed, that can be used to estimate the size).</p>

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@bclintonk

Actually, I hear about this problem much more at Cal and other units in the UC system than at Michigan. Not so say it doesn’t happen at Michigan, but I don’t think it’s nearly as common, and I don’t think you can generalize on the Cal experience. (For that matter, my D had trouble getting into a couple of popular classes she wanted to take at her tiny LAC; it can happen anywhere).

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<p>It does appear that some departments at Berkeley underprovision courses during phase 1 registration, then see where the demand is and add more space later (probably by reallocating TA assignments, or just waiting until later to assign TAs). See past history at <a href=“telebearsoracle.com”>telebearsoracle.com; . This may explain a lot of complaining about getting waitlisted for classes during phase 1 and 2 registration, but not much complaining from actual students about involuntary delayed graduation due to class availability issues.</p>