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They mean the student will be in large lecture classes and smaller discussion sections. What you cannot extrapolate from those numbers is how rigorous these larger classes are. I’ve watched many Berkeley lectures and done some of the problem sets to supplement my own classes, both at my previous school and current one. As best I can tell, the huge lecture courses at these schools are extremely rigorous and demand a great deal from students. Btw, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford all employ the large lecture class model for some of their intro classes, but I don’t hear people complaining that these students lack a solid foundation in their fields of study. </p>