If junior accountancy major Carrie Palcer wanted to ask a question in her UBUS 310 class, she’d have to yell it out.

That’s because there are more than 350 students in her class in the Dennis Barsema Auditorium.

Although Palcer enjoys having large classes, she also likes having more personal attention from her professors.

“I feel I have more interaction with the teacher in a smaller class,” Palcer said. “[The professor] can ask a specific person a question.”

John McDougald, a member of the finance department, is one of four teachers that instructs UBUS 310, which has about 350 students this semester and has the capacity for 375.

Although the auditorium is large, it was constructed so that even the back row doesn’t feel they’re too far away to hear the lecture.

McDougald said that larger classes make it easier for students to skip. He said that in his smaller classes, an average of 5 percent of students are missing, whereas in the large courses about 10 to 15 percent are missing a day.

However, McDougald gets to know some of the students in the large classes.

“Even in a class that size, I would expect to get to see and know 20 percent of the students,” McDougald said.

Junior management major Jason Flesher believes students benefit in large classes by learning how their teachers instruct a large class.

“The thing I like about the large classes is I get to watch how a professor carries himself in front of the class,” Flesher said.

However, there are benefits to having a smaller class.

“One of the differences is in a small class you can almost take the time to look in everyone’s face to see if they know what is going on,” McDougald said. “[In a larger class] professors focus in on fewer points to cover in detail so everyone can absorb the material being presented. More emphasis is put on major concepts.”

Theatre and dance professor Kent Gallagher has been teaching an Introduction to Theatre class with more than 100 students in it since he came out of graduate school.

“You need to be able to present a lot of material in and interesting and engaging way,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher also said he uses different methods in the larger classes.

“I arrange for all kinds of different demonstrations having to do with various aspects of theater,” he said.

One may think that large classes erupted in the ’90s, but mass lectures at NIU began after World War II.

After the war ended enrollment was 1,442 in 1946, which led to many classes having to be taught in lecture halls.

In the early 1950s, an English 110 class was forced to move to the then Library Auditorium in Swen Parson and the professor needed to use the public address system.