Our overall maximum for the number of students one professor can handle
unassisted is 18. However, enrollments in most lab classes are smaller
due to room size or due to equipment limitations. Our most typical lab
size is 12 students, and some sections are 8 students.
Another rule we have, which is stronger than the 18 limit, is a partner
limit. Being a small institution, and advertising various advantages of
that, we believe it is wrong to have more than two students partnered on
one piece of equipment. Experience has shown that a third person
typically watches rather than performs, and it goes downhill even more
rapidly with four.
Anecdotal story... My son is a physics major at a larger institution and
he complains about having 3 partners for a total of 4 students sharing
one piece of equipment. If he is partnered with aggressive motivated
students it is difficult to get his hands on the equipment and to have
much say about how to proceed. If he is partnered with lazy students he
does it all (which is what he prefers). On expensive equipment they
wait in line. Sometimes he has spent the first two hours of a
three-hour lab period waiting for his group's turn on the apparatus. I
wouldn't call that a three-hour lab... I'd call that a one-hour lab.
Anyway, if we want two students on an air track and we have lab sections
of 18, then we need 9 air tracks plus space to set them up plus space to
store them. The cost of air tracks is a hurdle, but space is a much
larger hurdle. Even though the university could eventually save money
by building a larger science building and buying more equipment, the
payback is really, really long... much longer than the building and
equipment lasts.
Do the math...At our marginal pay rate, an extra lab section costs about
$2000 in salary. A new building with equipment to handle all labs with
18 students would cost at least 10 million dollars. The payback would
occur after about 5,000 lab sections. We run perhaps 25 extra lab
sections a year (i.e. labs in excess of what we would run if all
sections had 18 students rather than some having 12 or 8 students.
5,000 sections until payback divided by 25 excess sections per year is
200 years. It would take 200 years to pay back the cost of a new
building and equipment if the primary reason for doing it were to run
sections of 18 students in all labs rather than 12 or 8 students per
lab. It's easy to see why the administration is willing to pay the
salary for the extra sections.
In the end, we have 4 air tracks and therefore have lab sections of 8
students. So far the administration agrees that we cannot advertise
ourselves as having the advantages of a small institution if we put
three or four students on a single apparatus. It would be wrong to say
there haven't been any administrators who have questioned this. But a
few good administrators have always agreed that three or four students
huddled around a typical lab set up is not good for any college, let
alone one that advertises itself as small and charges more than twice
the tuition of a state university,
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu
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