Last May, the five faculty members on the ad-hoc committee on grading practices and grade inflation proposed eliminating the Registrar’s minimum five-student enrollment for courses in order to counteract the College’s swelling course medians. The consequences of having a course cancelled and being forced to teach in a later term, they argued, motivated faculty to lower rigor to make sure enrollments are sufficient.
Yet the administration has upheld the policy, reserving the right to cancel courses that fail to meet the five-student minimum. Several professors interviewed expressed concerns about keeping this policy in place, citing the value of small seminar classes and the issues caused by the policy, such as grade inflation and uncertainty about faculty teaching loads.
In practice, most courses with enrollments below the minimum receive exemptions that save them from cancellation. The reasons for exemptions vary, ranging from courses that are required for majors and graduate students, to new course offerings and those taught by visiting or new faculty, which students may not take because they are unfamiliar.
This spring, only two of the 33 undergraduate courses with fewer than five students were cancelled, registrar Meredith Braz wrote in an email. The two courses had zero students enrolled, and Braz added that only a few courses are affected by this policy each term. If a faculty member’s course is cancelled, they are obligated to teach an extra course during a future term, a disruptive flaw of the policy that multiple professors criticized. English professor Ivy Schweitzer, who taught a class of four students this winter, noted that professors who plan to be off certain terms to conduct research may instead have to teach another course under the existing policy.
“If the College really wants us to be active scholars, which they do, then they have to preserve our time for research,” she said.
Some professors expressed a belief that financial considerations are what have kept the policy in place even after the ad-hoc committee’s recommendation.
Engineering professor Elsa Garmire said lower enrollment minimums are in place to prevent the College from losing too much money on particular courses, in a desire to keep tuition costs down.
“We advertise that our classes are smaller but that means that — in principle — they’re more expensive,” she said.
The policy first appeared in the ORC for the 1999-2000 academic year. The policy contains no accompanying written explanation. During that period the endowment grew rapidly, especially during the 1999 fiscal year when the endowment grew 15.4 percent, suggesting the policy may not have originally been put in place due to financial considerations.
The ad-hoc committee cited the low course enrollment policy as a cause of grade inflation. The committee’s report noted consistent accounts of faculty offering overly-generous grades to attract students and avoid cancellation. The committee also reported on anecdotal evidence that faculty encourage students to stay in under-enrolled courses long enough to avoid cancellation.
Biology professor Mark McPeek,who chaired the ad-hoc committee, said that, along with student evaluations, enrollment pressures more broadly were the main reason professors decreased course rigor. He added that enrollment determines, or is perceived to determine, the resources allocated to different departments.
“If a faculty member has a low enrollment in a class, they get pressure from the chair of the department, and the dean puts pressure on the department and the faculty member,” McPeek said.
Philosophy professor Adina Roskies,who also taught a class of four students this winter, added that the cancellation policy can create hardships for students who planned to take a certain course and are obliged to find another.
Perspectives on the low course enrollment policy differ between departments and divisions. Certain departments need to offer particular classes for majors that typically have low enrollments. The English major requires two classes in early English literature, which have seen low enrollments in past years. Schweitzer’s class on early American literature in the winter and a class on Restoration literature offered this term both have less than five students enrolled.
Departments like astronomy also see few students electing to major in them, astronomy professor Brian Chaboyer said, which makes having classes with low enrollment common.
The need to offer courses to attract graduate students can also lead to low course enrollments, as is the case for Garmire’s course on electromagnetic fields and waves. The reverse is also true. The lack of a graduate philosophy program results in some philosophy classes for advanced students interested in graduate school having low enrollments, according to Roskies.
However, some professors thought low enrollments might be a reason to reconsider the courses offered at the College. Engineering professor Mark Laser said that several consecutive years of low course enrollments for a particular class may show disinterest in the subject and be a reason to rethink offering that course.
Chaboyer noted that, despite the many exemptions, the uncertainty of whether a course will be cancelled or not is problematic, because it could discourage students from signing up for a class liable to be cancelled.
Certain types of faculty may have particular difficulty getting adequate course enrollments. Roskies noted that junior faculty who do not yet have a reputation may be in danger of having classes cancelled during their first year.
Associate dean of the arts and humanities Barbara Will wrote in an email that the low course enrollment policy aims to ensure equity in the teaching load of faculty members across departments. Faculty who teach low enrollment classes get teaching credit for the course, but those who lead similar sized independent study section do not receive any teaching credit.
Roskies also noted that independent studies are not run the same way as courses.
“It’s one thing to have a meeting with a student once a week and discuss what they’ve read. It’s another thing to prepare almost four hours of lecture a week.” Roskies said.
Engineering professor Eric Fossum said the equity issue could alternatively be addressed by giving credit to teachers for leading an independent study.
Many professors noted the benefit of small class sizes and maintained that teaching a small class was a similar amount of work to teaching a larger class.
“We had a fantastic time,” Schweitzer said abut her smaller courses. “It was so small I could run it like an apprenticeship model. Students said to me that they felt like we were all doing the scholarship together. It was what I would call a kind of community of inquiry. And that’s hard to do with even twelve people.”
Laser also noted the intimacy of the small class environment.
“The level of interaction and communication with your students is like sitting in your living room,” he said.
Not all professors agreed on the benefits of very small courses though.
“I will say that if you get a group of three to five students, that’s often not enough to be exciting. If you’re talking about a small upper-level course, it’s much more interesting if you have seven to 10 students.” Garmire said.
Schweitzer and Fossum both said that it is no easier to teach a course with very small number of students than it is to teach a typical-size course.
Will also wrote that courses taught by visiting professors are often smaller than courses taught by regular faculty and that there have been multiple recent instances of cancelling classes taught by visiting faculty.
Dean of the Faculty Michael Mastanduno declined to comment.
