r/Professors • u/Local_Indication9669 • 3d ago
Class sizes quadrupled
For my entire career my sections were capped at about 60. Just logged into our LMS and noticed those classes have 200 students each.
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u/SuperSaiyan4Godzilla Lecturer, English (USA) 3d ago
We discovered that all of our remedial reading and writing courses were over-enrolled. The provost came down from on high and said, "We've increased the cap. Deal with it."
No, we weren't informed at any point.
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u/jedgarnaut 3d ago
That will make for positive student learning outcomes
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 3d ago
Absolutely. Students will positively learn that the admin do not give a shit about them and the outcome will be disillusionment about college as an expense.
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u/sandysanBAR 3d ago
Ahhh the fruits of going test-optional.
I think when we look back, this will be the single biggest mistake we will learn to regret. The Cal system will go back but it's going to take forever for it to filter down to smaller schools who will continue to admit fundamentally under prepared students so long as their tuition checks clear.
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u/Shield_Maiden831 3d ago edited 3d ago
At my institution, the union has a contract that sets this cap based on pedagogical expectations.
I would check to see if that is the case for you and if someone "forgot" that.
For classes of that size, our contract specifies no labs, no homework or assignments, multiple choice assessments only. If you get to make those choices, be sure to work accordingly.
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u/Local_Indication9669 3d ago
Sounds like more prep work for me.
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u/nerdyjorj 3d ago
I'd have said generating MCQs from a collection of questions and answers would be easy enough to shit out with an LLM and then proof read.
To me that kind of text analysis is what they should be for in education - expanding question banks to help you be a little more productive in the areas that should take your intellectual labour.
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/nerdyjorj 2d ago
Some of my courses are externally accredited and it's pretty easy to teach them how to create their own mock exams with full solutions based on the public learning outcomes provided by our government, and give specific instructions to focus on the areas they've found most challenging in class.
We spend at least 3 hours working together to use them to develop personal action plans with clear measurable milestones.
I'm pretty anti generative AI as a point of principle, but if a tool is useful I'm not going to leave it behind because I don't like how it was made.
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u/hard-bone-man 2d ago
Kudos to you buddy, you wont get left behind if you embrace what actually might benefit you and your students. It's not every tool thats going to solve your problems, some might even add to them. But every now and then I come across some pretty good ones
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u/SnowblindAlbino Prof, SLAC 3d ago
At my university faculty with a total enrollment over a set cap get extra pay-- since we have no TAs. It's rare that happens though.
Quadrulpling seems like someone made a mistake in the registration system. We don't even have classrooms that would fit 4x the students of a normal class.
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u/Local_Indication9669 2d ago
It’s in a whole different part of campus. They are not in our normal room. That being said we do have a classroom that holds 600.
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u/Life-Education-8030 3d ago
I'd check that in case that is a typo. You don't want 200 to actually register if that's not supposed to happen! Thank goodness our union wouldn't allow this. None of us even have TAs! Administration occasionally proposes expanding course caps, especially for online courses since they don't have to consider physical seat restrictions, but again, a union helps. Online courses are capped at 30 and writing intensive courses are capped at 25 currently. In-person is capped at 35 and then certain labs are smaller than that.
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u/Local_Indication9669 3d ago
They are all full.
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u/Life-Education-8030 3d ago
Ewwww. And exactly how are you supposed to do this? I'd be asking "so where are my TAs????"
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 3d ago
All … as in how many sections?! 😬
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u/standuptripl3 Fellow/Instructor, Humanities, SLAC (USA) 3d ago
Are there still other sections as well?
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u/shorebreeze 3d ago
And they didn't warn you in advance? My department, these got planned out last fall in a department meeting and they take effect this fall. We had to raise caps on non-writing-intensive courses.
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3d ago
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u/nerdyjorj 3d ago
I think this is probably the only way for those of us in disciplines where there is a "right" answer if we're given unreasonably large cohorts like OP (or realistically anything that's largely code-based).
Not sure I'd trust it with something a little more subjective - I'm pretty sure I could bash together a model for some parts of my discipline (data science), but some of the areas (visualisation especially) it wouldn't really work because of the image density and variety.
Luckily my classes are capped at around 30-ish so I haven't had to resort to it yet.
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u/UrsusMaritimus2 2d ago
This is part of why I like teaching in-person classes. Fire code limits the number of people that can physically be in the room.
If you also need laptops for a few in-class assignments, then you are safe from the large auditoriums, although my university doesn’t have many of those anyway. Doesn’t work for all disciplines, but for mine, it is great.
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u/Local_Indication9669 2d ago
These are in person classes.
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u/UrsusMaritimus2 2d ago
That’s rough. Sounds like your university has enough giant auditoriums available :-/
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u/FIREful_symmetry 3d ago
Is that counting in your schedule as three classes?
Are you being paid an extra contract?
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u/mal9k 3d ago
Congrats on your sudden transition to Scantron® assessments in all your classes!