Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes Forum

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booknerd

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Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by booknerd » Sat Aug 04, 2018 3:13 pm

I really prefer small class sizes. Right now I'm going to a liberal arts college and all of my classes have about 20 or so people in them and the ones that have more have a smaller discussion section. I'm starting to look at law schools to figure out which ones I might want to go to and I'm mostly interested in law schools with small class sizes. I'm wondering if any t-14 schools have classes that have 30 or fewer people in them.

RedPurpleBlue

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Re: Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by RedPurpleBlue » Sun Aug 05, 2018 5:04 pm

booknerd wrote:I really prefer small class sizes. Right now I'm going to a liberal arts college and all of my classes have about 20 or so people in them and the ones that have more have a smaller discussion section. I'm starting to look at law schools to figure out which ones I might want to go to and I'm mostly interested in law schools with small class sizes. I'm wondering if any t-14 schools have classes that have 30 or fewer people in them.
You're going to have pretty much 50+ person sections for first year classes wherever you go. No matter where you go, you're not going to get to 20 person sections for your first year classes. I think Cornell's could be around 35-40 in each first year section, but that's the smallest it gets. Law school is not like a liberal arts college where every class is basically a seminar. Law school's largely revolve around lecturing and cold calling. Now, in your second and third year, you'll be able to take specialty coursework/seminars that are usually much smaller. On one hand, I say usually, because sometimes some higher level electives like Evidence, Civ Pro II, etc. can be quite popular and fill up quite quickly. On the other hand, you have classes like corporate tax that might have a capacity of 70 but only 8 students sign up every year. Still, regardless of the size, unless you're taking a specifically seminar/colloquium class, there's likely to be a lot of lecturing.

uncle_rico

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Re: Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by uncle_rico » Sun Aug 05, 2018 7:09 pm

Cornell’s sections are ~35 students which I like but most courses during 1L had two sections so ~70 students. Upper level courses can be anywhere from 20 to 150 students

sparkytrainer

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Re: Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by sparkytrainer » Sun Aug 05, 2018 7:23 pm

The three smallest t13s are Yale UChicago and Duke, all clocking in at around 200 per class. Compared to say UVA with 350. At Duke, the small sections are 20-25. I imagine its the same at Yale and UChicago.

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4LTsPointingNorth

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Re: Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by 4LTsPointingNorth » Sun Aug 05, 2018 7:31 pm

sparkytrainer wrote:The three smallest t13s are Yale UChicago and Duke, all clocking in at around 200 per class. Compared to say UVA with 350. At Duke, the small sections are 20-25. I imagine its the same at Yale and UChicago.
Currently, the smallest T13 is Stanford, followed by Cornell & Chicago, followed by Yale. But that metric alone isn't really directly responsive to OP's question which is more about section size. [https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-sc ... w-rankings]

Columbia, for example, has a huge class size but offers very small 1L legal writing classes (10-12 people) and one small 1L lecture section (30 people) in addition to the normal 1L lecture courses. The normal section size there is 90-100 people, though. Upper-year classes range from 8-16 person seminars to full lecture courses (25-150 people).

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Wild Card

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Re: Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by Wild Card » Sun Aug 05, 2018 9:56 pm

you will quickly discover that the law is extremely boring and meaningless and that all of your classmates are sociopaths

goldenbear2020

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Re: Are there any T-14 schools with small class sizes

Post by goldenbear2020 » Tue Aug 21, 2018 4:10 pm

Average 1L section size from 509 disclosures:
Cornell 34
UVA 46
NU 55
Stanford 60
Duke 61
Michigan 65
H/Y 80
Penn 83
NYU 85
Chicago 93
Columbia 99
Berkeley 101
GULC 105

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