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Class Size

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Download this data here (Last updated on March 27, 2024)
Sources & Methodology:
  • Curriculum and teaching data are available in Berkeley's data warehouse reporting system, Cal Answers. For this dashboard, we're only including primary class sections, such as lectures and seminars, taught in Fall and Spring semesters. We are not including independent studies classes, ungraded discussion/lab secondary sections, or classes taught in the Summer term.
  • Lower division undergraduate courses have course numbers between 1 and 99. Upper division undergraduate courses have course numbers between 100 and 199. Graduate classes have course numbers greater than 199.
  • Results for each question on the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey are available on the Office of Planning & Analysis website.
  • The "Classes by Size and Level" and "Distribution of Enrollments" pages of this dashboard count the total number of students in a room to determine class sizes. Cases of crosslisting or roomsharing are therefore treated as a single bundled "class." In situations where a class is crosslisted or roomshared across course levels (for example, an upper division course and a graduate course on the same topic being taught together), we're including the total enrollment for the bundle under each course level.
  • In cases where a student changes undergraduate years (e.g., moves from a junior to a senior) between a fall and spring semester, we are counting them once under each level within that academic year in the "Median Class Size by Student" and "Explore the Data on Your Own" pages. This undergraduate level data is based on the number of terms a student has been in attendance, not the number of units they've completed.
  • On the "Median Class Size by Student" page, we've used a visualization technique called "jittering" in order to make the graph more readable. In the Student Year field on the horizontal access, undergraduate students will only have integer values of 1-4. If we then tried to chart that, however, there would only be four columns of dots. So, for each student, we've added a random number (0 < n < 1) to their year value, which has the effect of spreading out the dots over a wider horizontal area.
Notes on Other Available Data:
  • Section I (Instructional Faculty and Class Size) of the Common Data Set includes tables for undergraduate class size, for both "sections" (e.g., lectures) and "subsections" (e.g., discussion sections). Note that the Common Data Set has specific instructions for how to count classes, including using only Fall term data, among other differences with this dashboard.