Thanks, this is a great comment. A lot of these are points that I hadn’t considered in depth, though some are points that I deliberately decided against including. That’s because the focus of this post was about selecting between instructors who are offering different sections of what, on paper, is the same course. The questions of whether to take honors classes or what course level to do are questions I plan to explore in depth in future posts.
I did mention peer groups, but relegated that mention mostly to the PS of my post. That’s because, in the particular narrow context of my post, I don’t think there is a huge peer selection effect. What I mean is that different sections of what is nominally the same course will generally see fairly similar student populations, despite differences in the actual quality of the instructor or the instruction. There’s two broad reasons: (i) most students aren’t optimizing too much for instructor within sections at the same course level, but rather, are affected by scheduling considerations, and (ii) departments often impose space constraints on class sizes in such a manner as to make sure that each section has a similar size. Within these space limits, treatment tends to be first-come-first-serve. Thus, even if better peers want to take a class with a specific instructor, in the highly space-constrained and first-come-first-serve world, they’re unlikely to be able to reliably succeed at doing so.
The case where peer selection effects would be strongest in such a first-come-first-serve enrollment process would be where an instructor develops a good reputation with students at a certain quality level and a bad reputation with students at lower quality levels, so that those students are actually trying to avoid the instructor.
Oh, sorry. I think I interpreted “assuming that the major and course level are given” differently than you intended. My university is too small to offer different sections of the same course by different instructors.
Thanks, this is a great comment. A lot of these are points that I hadn’t considered in depth, though some are points that I deliberately decided against including. That’s because the focus of this post was about selecting between instructors who are offering different sections of what, on paper, is the same course. The questions of whether to take honors classes or what course level to do are questions I plan to explore in depth in future posts.
I did mention peer groups, but relegated that mention mostly to the PS of my post. That’s because, in the particular narrow context of my post, I don’t think there is a huge peer selection effect. What I mean is that different sections of what is nominally the same course will generally see fairly similar student populations, despite differences in the actual quality of the instructor or the instruction. There’s two broad reasons: (i) most students aren’t optimizing too much for instructor within sections at the same course level, but rather, are affected by scheduling considerations, and (ii) departments often impose space constraints on class sizes in such a manner as to make sure that each section has a similar size. Within these space limits, treatment tends to be first-come-first-serve. Thus, even if better peers want to take a class with a specific instructor, in the highly space-constrained and first-come-first-serve world, they’re unlikely to be able to reliably succeed at doing so.
The case where peer selection effects would be strongest in such a first-come-first-serve enrollment process would be where an instructor develops a good reputation with students at a certain quality level and a bad reputation with students at lower quality levels, so that those students are actually trying to avoid the instructor.
Oh, sorry. I think I interpreted “assuming that the major and course level are given” differently than you intended. My university is too small to offer different sections of the same course by different instructors.