The Partition Function for Student Laboratories

Increasing lecture course size involves locating a larger lecture hall and arranging more teaching assistants to do the grading. However, increasing students in laboratory courses has no such simple solution. Increasing student enrollment in laboratory courses involves

• fire code concerns
• available number of experiments
• chemical inventory, especially with regard to solvents
• evaluation of experimental reports

To resolve these issues, it is necessary to develop more experiments that are robust with regard to usage and to use creative scheduling. This presentation discusses the ways Rice University and the University of Houston have responded to increases in student enrollment.