The Size of a Class: Two Viewpoints

Larry Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso posed a problem in The Playground section of Math Horizons magazine (v 17, n 3, February 2010, p. 30), a problem that has a bearing on the oft-discussed question of the class size. As the problem implies, the view point on the size of a class may depend on who you ask, a teacher or a student.

Consider a 9-student school consisting of two 2-student classrooms and one 5-student classroom. The mean class size on a per-class basis would of course be

2 + 2 + 5 3

=

3

while the mean class size on a per-student basis would be

(2 + 2) + (2 + 2) + (5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5) 9

=

11 3

This means that the average class size experienced by the teachers at this school, and likely advertised by the administration, is smaller than the average class size experienced by the students. The question is, if this is just one case of a more general phenomenon: if n students are distributed among k non-empty classes, must the per-student mean class size always be at least as large as the per-class mean class size?

Solution

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where M_i denotes the i-th mean of a given set of numbers {a_s, s = 1, 2, ..., k}. M₁ is the arithmetic mean; M₂ is the quadratic mean. We know that in a general

M₁ ≥ M₂.

with the equality only when all the numbers are the same. It follows that A₁ ≥ A₂.

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