News-Letter

Media Credit: Britni Crocker Organic Chemistry, a pre-med requirement, is the largest class on campus with 546 current students.

Sophomore Anne Kirwan wakes up each morning to the buzzing of an alarm clock only to sit through the similar buzzing of her professor in her Orgo class.

The droning of chemical reactions and clacking of chalk on blackboard is amplified only by the echoes of her large lecture hall. As she treks across campus to her Biochemistry midterm, she knows she is not alone in her misery.

This semester, Organic Chemistry I is the biggest class on campus with a total of 546 students registered.

The next three biggest classes are Biochemistry with 400 students, Elements of Macroeconomics with 396 students and General Biology I plus Workshop with 345 students total.

Hopkins's 12:1 student ratio seems paltry when compared to Harvard's 7:1 student-teacher ratio and Duke's 8:1 student-teacher ratio.

Five percent of all Hopkins classes had over 100 students while 0.5 percent of Harvard classes had over 100 students.

While its student-teacher ratio fares better than the University of Maryland's 19:1, Hopkins still has some large introductory classes and major requirements like Organic Chemistry.

"It is intimidating because there are so many other people you know you have to compete with for the normalization and curve," Kirwan said.

"There is no student-teacher interaction unless you're one of those students who answers all the questions."

Over the years, the administration has made some efforts to either reduce class sizes or alleviate the adverse effects of larger classes.

One effort was to simply cap registration in some classes or split the one single class between two professors.

The latter is currently being done with Organic Chemistry this semester.

"Our Orgo class had like 700 people in our freshman year," junior Liny John said.

Another strategy to lower the effects of some large classes is the section system in which students in a class are split into numerous sections of about 15 students each led by a teaching assistant (TA). Some students have found the sections extremely beneficial.

"I learn a lot more in Calc section than I learn in Calc lecture because the Calc lecture is so big; I can't ask questions," freshman Steven Qian said. "I feel [that] especially for math, you need small classes because if you don't understand the fundamentals, you won't understand the future topics."

Continued...

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