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Comment by Jcampuzano2 | Hacker News Reader

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it.

You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway.

For example with the popularity of computer science and STEM in general, at my school there were often 2-3 teachers teaching linear algebra in any given semester. And same for popular classes like calculus or introductory physics. Students would often lookup online which teacher was considered easier, but they still had to take the class.

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> It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it.

Remember, in European countries students are admitted to study a specific subject at university, rather than being admitted to the university as a whole and expected to choose a major later on.

So there are multiple courses going on, with a lot of intersection between the topics covered. There's maths for computer scientists (heavy on the discrete maths), maths for engineers (heavy on the integrals and matrices), maths for social scientists (heavy on the statistics), and so on.

So both American and European universities split their year 1 maths courses so they can get a few thousand first-year undergraduates through the largest 300-500 seat lecture theatres. But in Europe it's a split by subject, rather than by choose-your-instructor.

> Remember, in European countries students are admitted to study a specific subject at university, rather than being admitted to the university as a whole and expected to choose a major later on.

This is true in the US as well. You can change your major, but you are admitted into a College in the University. Moving to another College is not guaranteed if you later change your mind.

Why would you do that? It doubles the workload for the faculty and gains.. nothing? That's the whole point of a lecture: You have one person teaching many. Beyond very small lectures (<10 people) it really doesn't get to direct interactions anyhow (or it's really, really hard to get students to interact with you. I tried..).

Especially something like Linear Algebra can easily have class sizes of 800+ people at big universities. Yes there is typically exactly one lecture hall for that and you have 30+ exercise groups. But still only one faculty

Sorry I'm not implying I have any practical reason why this is the case. Its just how it was when I was in school.

But I'll say where I went to school, and I hear its even worse now since enrollment in STEM is way up, there were often multiple thousands of students every quarter wanting to take just one class, so they split it up because we simply didn't have lecture halls with enough seats. There would often be 3-4 classes each of 500+ students all full, and still students struggling to get in due to the maximum amount per course. Usually there was around two teachers splitting the sessions, and they also have their other more advanced courses and/or research.

So its probably just practicality in terms of their time and resources. This wasn't an issue with more advanced courses where there was usually only one teacher per semester offering the class.

Why would a university need multiple professorts seaching the same subject at the same time? A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually. And even for questions andexcercises those are often already handled by teaching assistants of which there can be many as needed.

Having the choice between different professors with supposedly different difficulties for what is supposed to be the same course seems absurd.

> A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually

There's a line of research that shows that high quality one-on-one instruction gets you up to 2stdev gains in learning performance.

If you can afford to increase the professor to student ratio and make them available for office hours, you probably do see increases in performance. Is it due to better motivation? Seeing an academic up close? Actually better explanations you get from an expert in the subject? Hard to say.

As I mentioned in another comment, I don't have any argument as to why. Just how it was when I was in school so thats what I'm used to.

But I also mentioned that there are often thousands of students all trying to take one course. And the schools simply don't have the space to fit all of them in one session since I believe the rules are basically that it needs to be held in a lecture hall big enough to fit every enrolled student, and teachers don't have the time to teach 4 different sessions by themselves on top of their other duties. Maybe class sizes are just smaller elsewhere, but where I went to school it was not unheard of to have multiple thousands of students needing to take one class that was required for practically every STEM major in a given semester.

Popular classes may have many hundreds of students enrolled, and schools may not have classrooms large enough to fit all the students in. Professor time is finite and may not scale to giving duplicate lectures, supervising tens of TAs and deal with the 5% of students who demand unusual attention.

So schools offer multiple sections of the same class to share the workload. E.g. in recent years Computer Science 101 - often the most popular class on campus.

As absurd as having them teach the same course year after year? Why not then just record their lectures and place them online.

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