@VeryLuckyParent, well, apparently, not all class sections are capped (to a number under 50) if even at UChicago, 6% of classes are >50 in size.
And considering that people have already worked out the math for you, I fail to see why it’s hard for you to believe that there are some students who have half their classes in ones with >50 students even at schools where only 10% of classes are >50.
And @Pizzagirl was talking about a very related (essentially the same) subject.
Regarding the number of 50+ class students at Stanford, I have have taken classes in numerous different fields there. My experience was that Stanford rarely offers more than 1 of a particular class per quarter, but has a large number of sections with much small sizes, where more individual discussion occurs. That 1 large class is often taught by a well known figure in the field who wrote the textbook and whose research relates to some of the core class concepts. This system results in the more popular low-level prereqs often being quite large, in some cases hundreds of students that can fill up an auditorium. The larger classes include the basic class level (other slower/faster/more rigorous/more eng focused/different levels of these classes available, which are not as crowded) intro chem, bio, physics, and math, which are prereqs for pre-med and types of engineering, as well as some of the more popular general humanities type requirements for graduation, and other low level classes that are just generally popular such as intro CS classes, intro to statistics, and intro psychology. Upper level classes that were rarely taken by people outside my major almost never had 50+ persons because my major did not have 50+ persons in it. You can estimate the size of specific classes by looking up the number of sections at https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/ . One might roughly estimate 10 persons for section, so classes with 5+ sections have 50+ students. So a particular student might have most of his classes 50+ or hardly any, depending on his major and the specific classes he chooses to fulfill his major.
As a specific example, one of my most enjoyable classes was an intro bio class taught by Robert Sapolsky. I’d encourage anyone to read his books for fun, which were texts for the class. They include stories about things like studying baboon behavior in a wild African environment, then darting them and measuring hormone levels . The books have great reviews on Amazon from laypersons with little bio background, as well as experts. He’s also a really great lecturer, and has won numerous awards including a genius grand and the Carl Sagan award for science populization. All students who take intro bio get the opportunity to take Sapolsky’s class (or at least they did in my year), rather than splitting the class into a large number of smaller subclasses, taught by less experienced persons who would likely provide less of memorable experience. Grad students lead small sections after the class that discuss the lecture and give the opportunity for more of an interactive group discussion about the concepts. The same concept can apply to other special opportunities, such as Mark Zuckerburg guest lecturing in a popular intro CS class. Everyone gets to see Zuckerburg’s lecture about the class concepts instead of a lucky few.
Sapolsky’s great!
Sorry I’ve missed this thread for a few days, but Pizzagirl and Purple Titan both expressed the essential mathematical point. Large classes are, by definition, large, i.e., it takes a lot of students to fill each class. Small classes are, by definition, small, i.e., it takes few students to fill each class. So it takes a lot more small classes to fill up as much time in students’ schedules (on average and in the aggregate) as large classes. Here’s a stylized example. If you have only two categories of classes, those with 100 students (large classes) and those with 10 students (small classes), it would take 10 small classes to take up as much time in students’ schedules (on average, and in the aggregate) as each large class. That would be 91% small classes. But then if each student took, e.g., 4 classes per semester, and there were 1,000 students, you’d need 4,000 class places per semester to fill everyone’s schedule, You could accomplish this with 20 large classes (20 X 100 =2,000 class places) and 200 small classes (200 X 10 = 2,000 class places). You’d have 91% small classes, but on average each student would be taking 2 large classes (1,000 students X 2 large classes(= 2,000 class places = 20 large classes) and 2 small classes (1,000 students X 2 small classes = 2,000 class places = 200 small classes).
There’s a kind of optical illusion here. If you see that 91% of classes are small, you tend to leap to the conclusion that on average each student spends 91% of their time in small classes. But mathematically, that can’t possibly be correct. US News plays into this optical illusion by heavily rewarding schools for a high percentage of small classes (<20 in US News metrics) while de-emphasizing the percentage of large classes. But the percentage of large classes actually does much more to determine how much time students spend in large classes (again, because large classes are, by definition, large, and so on average each large class has more influence on where students spend their time than each small class). If you focus on the percentage of large classes, you’ll quickly see that most private research universities are more similar to the top publics in regard than they are to the leading LACs, which are distinguished by having small to trivial numbers of large classes.
A bit late to the discussion. In our local ivy, it’s clearly the university. They are far more lenient in accepting local applicants. Local A- students will get in although the university rejects A+ students from elsewhere not infrequently. I wonder if stats are too coarse to catch that. If it include the entire state in the local, it may not show up.