Dartblog

Economics Professor Andrew Samwick writes in with a suggestion for greater precision in our examination of small classes:

The fall term is not representative of the full year of economics courses, as we do not offer any of our 40-level culminating experience courses in the fall. (We do offer one of the three 80-level courses that form an honors sequence, 80-81-82.) If you look at the full list of economics courses, you will see that we offer 20 sections that have course numbers in the 40’s or 80’s. Each of these courses has a target enrollment of 15 students. You can verify this for past years by looking at the median grade data on the Registrar’s website, with the proviso that when you see two sections with the same enrollment of, say, 24, that is reflecting the fact that the instructor chose to pool the 24 students across both sections in assigning the median grade. (Each section had an average enrollment of 12.)

Dartblog is nothing if not responsive to the observations of famous professors, so we leapt to do the analysis suggested by Professor Samwick. The Econ department (which was called “Ecy” in my day as a student) offers 110 classes each year, of which twenty are 40’s and 80’s level classes, and therefore, as Professor Samwick points out, have fewer than 20 students enrolled in them. An additional few Economics classes (statistics, mainly) occasionally have fewer than 20 students, too, so it would be fair to observe that over the entire academic year, approximately 20% of the classes in Dartmouth’s Department of Economics have fewer than 20 students in them.