The booklet from the American Chemical Society: Safety in Academic Chemistry Laboratories (Accident Prevention for Faculty and Administrators, 7th Edition) states:"Laboratory instructors are responsible for the safety of their laboratory students; no more than 25 students should be assigned at the same time to work in a laboratory under the supervision of an instructor." We set the max at 24 for the first freshmen course although we might let one more in assuming the enrollment will go down. An odd number is inconvenient if they are working in pairs. The second freshman course as well as the quantitative analysis course have limits of 22 this semester. We try to keep the Organic courses at 18 or lower. The students can just get themselves into a lot more trouble in these courses so "prudent practice" calls for fewer students for the instructor to try to keep safe. Higher level courses are certainly smaller and part of this has to do with limits in space and equipment. Sandra Koster, Senior Lecturer University of Wisconsin-La Crosse skoster**At_Symbol_Here**uwlax.edu On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Steehler, Gailwrote: > What policies or guidelines do universities use to set enrollment caps on > instructional labs? Our Chemistry Department caps lab sections at 24 in > lower level courses. I believe we have used safety as the justification, > but could not find the source of that specific number. Some of our lab > courses have lower caps due to specifics of equipment, techniques, or space. > I have a program that wants to justify lower caps for instructional labs. > I need some sense of what is standard or what criteria we might use. > > Gail Steehler > Roanoke College > gsteehle**At_Symbol_Here**roanoke.edu > >
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