In my college (New Jersey Institute of Technology), corses offered by the Physics Department usually have low enrollment limit of no less than 6 students per section. What mechanism determines this number, is beyond me, probably some financial considerations.
There are exceptions from this rule, e.g., when I offered a new course on special relativity and the school approved it, the first semester we had only 4 students enrolled, nevertheless the Department decided to run the course as an experiment. Next year we had already 6 enrolled students despite the time conflict with Astronomy courses, whose students are statistically most probable enrollers in relativity course.
(I had first emailed this to all, but for some damned reason it returned to me unprocessed)
Moses Fayngold,
Department of Physics,
fayngold@adm.njit.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Forum for Physics Educators [mailto:PHYS-L@list1.ucc.nau.edu]On
Behalf Of RAUBER, JOEL
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 11:35 AM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Low enrollment courses
Do any of you come from schools or know of schools that cancel low
enrollment courses (sections)? If so, how do they handle exceptions?
In particular I'm interested in schools that use a mechanism along th=
e
lines of the average section size for the department must be above a
certain magic number. Or other creative ways allowing, the often low
enrollment advanced physics courses, to proceed.
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Thanks. =20
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FYI, the magic number for a section not to be canceled at our system =
is
10 students in an undergraduate section.
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________________________=20
Joel Rauber=20
Department of Physics - SDSU=20