What's the deal with 400 students?

In the Fall of 2006 (for the first time since a disastrous experiment in 1963) the Mathematics Department began teaching its flagship calculus sequence (Math 3ABC) in lectures so large that only two or three rooms on campus could hold them. Neither room has blackboards. Both rely instead on dim overhead projectors. Here is a description of the rooms, taken from a recent external review.

The background to the departmental decision is two-fold: improvements in computer aided instruction that allow automatic homework grading; and a long-term decline in permanent faculty.

Rather than fret about the ethics of posting [Warning: obscenity-laced] rants along with more thoughtful criticisms, I no longer post evaluations from courses so large that they need to be taught in these two rooms. My teaching evaluations from such classes are mostly hostile, trust me (though a few are accurate ).