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But why should an undergraduate care what a professor does with his time outside the confines of the classroom and office hours? Those are the times the vast majority of students will interact with the faculty member. If you want to conduct specific research with the professor out of the blue after a particularly fascinating lecture one day, you obviously need to jump through some hoops and get permission at Duke much like you would at UCLA or Michigan but this doesn’t apply top 95% of students.</p>
<p>I maintain that as long as a professor is able to meaningfully engage a classroom in a small-group setting in discussions about the subject matter, give feedback whenever a student asks for it, and promptly answer emails to questions students have after class, then he is more than doing his/her job. However, this is anything but guaranteed at public schools where the professor has to sit in a lecture hall with 400 undergraduates and is unable to field questions from students real-time during the lecture since its impossible to hear anyone.</p>
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My experience with Political Science classes at Duke would compel me to disagree with this statement. In a class of 40 to 50 students, every student in the room will be able to recognize everyone else’s face at least by the first month and people definitely notice if you consistently don’t participate in discussions.</p>
<p>One of my sophomore classes in Political Science was a 30-40 person section in which the professor included participation as an overall component in the final grade so everyone was forced to raise their hand and contribute to the conversation. The professor would stop every 5-10 minutes to get a student’s analysis on an aspect of the readings that were assigned for that day. In fact, there was a set of readings due for each class and so the lecture’s purpose was to cement key concepts and have a Socratic dialogue amongst classmates to break down different theories and concepts that were presented in the text.</p>
<p>In a 100 person class, it would be truly impossible to force any student to get involved in classroom discussions and many students can simply not show up to class and not suffer any penalty. I remember this clearly because the first Introductory Economics class was this way at Duke. I can only imagine how poor the classroom experience would be if I had to take a dozen or so classes like that, which might have been the case at a place like Texas or UCLA.</p>
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So, you would only include the USWNR Peer Assessment ratings as part of your rankings and nothing else? That’s the only way that Cal and Michigan land in these ranges; the use of almost any other measure such as selectivity, counselor rankings, class sizes, financial resources, etc. would cause these schools to tumble.</p>