Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

guaranteed of this involvement, for example, if he majors
in Asian studies, or Classics, or geological sciences, or
history of art.
Q. Is it then a matter of supply and demand?
A. No. There is more to it than that because in the best
of all possible worlds one would not wish a student to distort
his selection of major simply to get small classes. You
would like a student who wants to major in English to be
able to take small classes. Since so many of our students, not
only in Arts and Sciences, but in other colleges, go on to
graduate work or professional schools, the key thing is that
there should be enough upperclass professors who know a
student well enough to recommend him to graduate school.
If a student's experience has been so impersonal that no
professor knows him well enough to recommend him to
graduate school, I think our educational system is breaking
down.
Q. Did the commission study the constant student complaint
that Cornell classes are too large and too anonymous?
A. Yes. There is an elementary idea involved here which
is difficult to get across. Let me try. Suppose I am a Cornell
professor and I ask myself what my experience is and what
the institution looks like to me. It turns out most of my
class time is spent in small classes because most of the
classes at Cornell are small. If I have four classes a year,
the chances are that one will be a large freshman or sophomore
class, but the other three will be small upperclass
courses, or seminars, or graduate seminars. So the professors
'. . . we are certain
that the new dormitory
complex will be very
imaginative and a
highly effective way
of creating a total
educational environment.*
and, if we're not very careful, the administration tend to
think of the institution as a place where there are no class
size problems.
But, let's look at it from the student standpoint. A student
taking these same courses looks at it quite differently because
his chance of being in a course with two hundred
students is twenty times as great as being in a course with
only ten students. If you look at the student experience, you
find that the probability of his being in the large courses is
higher than the probability of his being in a small course,
so, from the student's standpoint, it's just the reverse of the
professor's.
The student thinks of the institution, on the average, as a
place where most of the classes are large. It's a little bit
like the traffic situation in New York City. If you think of
the average over the course of the day on FDR Drive, it's
not jammed up. On the other hand, if you are a commuter
going in the morning and out in the afternoon, you are on
the highway when the jam is heaviest. The reason you're
more likely to be there at that time is exactly the reason the
jam is heaviest. The student is more likely to be in a large
course than in a small one and that's where the problem
arises. Now, this is a very elementary idea which people
presumably have known about for years. Nevertheless, it
is rather intricate which may explain to some extent the
difference in thinking of faculty, who tend to think there is
no class size problem, and students, who tend to think
there is.
Q. Is there a definite correlation in the students 9 minds
between large class and inadequate teaching?
A. I suspect it's an individual thing. There are some very
successful large classes in which the lecturer is a so-called
"star" who spends a great deal of time bringing all of his
experience to bear on making a compact, efficient presentation
of material to students which is followed up in small
recitation or laboratory sections.
On the other hand, there are probably courses involving
only the large lecture which, although good, by no means
takes advantage of the entire experience of the professor in
bringing it to bear on undergraduate teaching problems. I
don't know whether the students, as a whole, correlate large
courses with poor teaching. I hope they do not, because I
don't think there is such a correlation. I think the only
question is that of the appropriate mix of large courses and
small courses over the four years during which a typical
student is at Cornell. I think there's no danger in a student
being only involved in small courses while he is here. I
think the only warning flags that are flying, to which we have
to pay some attention, are those telling of the danger of the
student being only involved in large courses.
Q. In terms of student assessment of teaching, there were
some suggestions in the Kahn-Bowers report of students
possibly rating teachers. Has anything been done on this?
A. Well, here's a question where the character of the
commission has turned out to be very sensible. There are
some areas of evaluation which are natural faculty areas.
There are some areas which are natural student areas. It's
possible that the administration has no role at all in this.
What the commission did was to divide a very tangled
problem by separating it into two different solution approaches.
One was the creation of the course evaluation
questionnaire, largely the work of Assistant Professor
James B. Maas of Psychology. This questionnaire was used
by many faculty members at the end of the fall semester
for the purpose of getting "feedback" from students to use
in improving the course. The faculty members need not
show the results of the questionnaire to anybody else and,
in general, probably will not. They simply use it to improve
the course the next time they give it.
The second consideration involves information the students
need in order to select courses. In the fall, Student
Government published the preliminary issue of a document
called Index which gave students descriptive evaluations
of some twenty courses. The students intend to look at fall
term courses in order to bring out a new issue of Index,
presumably for pre-registration time in the spring. This
issue will tackle, I hope, a good deal more than twenty
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