Somehow, when we were in graduate school, the idea of teaching a huge class was something that, if we thought about it at all, was like cancer or horrible automobile accidents with body parts strewn over the highway-something that happened to somebody else. Certainly "the system" doesn't prepare people to teach large classes. At most, a few graduate schools will have a week long training session for teaching assistants, with maybe a low-key teaching seminar, but otherwise the assumption seems to be that teaching a large class is something like sneezing; a skill that is not terribly demanding, and one is born with. If you know your subject, as evidenced by a brilliant dissertation in the case of a newly-hired instructor, or a successful string of publications for a more senior person, what more do you need to teach a large introductory class? A great deal, as it turns out.
"The game" has changed dramatically in large colleges and universities in the past few years. In the old days, large introductory classes for majors were viewed as a kind of Darwinian filter, where unsuitable students could be expeditiously screened to a manageable number at minimal expense. Large general-education courses for non-majors were a necessary evil, and a sinkhole for new faculty, or those on the department chair=s hit list. There were always a few thespic souls who loved big classes (and who in turn were often loved by students), but they were regarded as a benign aberration, once again demonstrating that the academy generally smiles on eccentrics.
Now, however, in large universities that were formerly funded primarily by their state governments, students' tuition payments make up an ever increasing segment of the budget, and there is increasing recognition that students pay faculty salaries. That is an attention-getting thought, if ever there was one.
The old chestnut that tough professors formerly used on the first day of class, "Look to your left. Now look to your right. In four years, two of you will be gone," takes on new meaning, when you add "and so will your tuition payments." With large universities engaging in aggressive recruiting competitions for students, retention of students who have been won in hard-fought (and expensive) recruiting battles assumes a new importance. If a marginal (but non-university subsidized) student can be retained for the full four years, deans and vice-provosts for budget will have very large smiles. Unfortunately, the easiest way to assure retention is through grade inflation, a disease that seems to have affected even the noblest of academic institutions. In many cases this is a sure-fire (albeit questionably ethical) technique, because the student has been long gone before anyone discovers that he or she can't write a coherent English sentence. However, in pre-professional undergraduate education, grade inflation is a much riskier business, because most pre-professional students must take some sort of standardized knowledge test toward the end of their college careers (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.), and this examination will quickly reveal that an institution's A grade is a mark of a sweet and winning personality rather than academic prowess. This information has a way of finding its way to prospective students (and their parents) to the detriment of the overly-generous institution. Colleges (and professors) thus face a dilemma; how do you manage to retain increasingly marginal students, without being able to use grade inflation? Even more vexing, how do you do this when many of the classes those students will take in their first two years will be enormous ones?---
