College Selection Guru

Depending on the student learning preferences and the subject material of the class, the student to teacher ratio can be extremely important.  Many students need the ability to get personal attention and access to the professor during and after classes.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel helpless in very large classes.

The learning capacity of students varies. Some perform well even in large classes with a more fast-paced setting while others opt for small classes with a more personalized instruction. The size of a class most often influences the level of knowledge gained by students. It is, therefore, crucial to check the average number of students in a class in picking the right college or university for you.

The total number of students can give you an idea of how big the college is. A small school has less than two thousand students, a medium college’s student population ranges from more than 2,000 to less than 10,000 while a large college usually has more than 10,000 students. You can calculate the student-to-teacher ratio by dividing the number of students enrolled in the institution by the number of teachers.

However, you need to be careful, because even when performing this calculation, you could end up getting surprised when your freshman classes are a lot larger than you expected.   Many schools have research professors that teach either zero or very few classes.  Other schools have a policy of giving junior and senior students more attention than freshman and sophomore students, thus skewing the student to teacher ratio much lower than it will be during your first two years.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 7:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.