First, students believe that they can tell very early in the semester whether or not a professor really wants class discussion. Students are also well aware that there exist in college classrooms a rather distinctive consolidation of responsibility. In any classroom there seems almost inevitably to be a small group of students who can be counted on to respond to questions asked by the professor or to generally have comments on virtually any issue raised in class. Our observational data indicated that on the average a very small number of students are responsible for the majority of all talk that occurs in class on any given day. The fact that this “consolidation of responsibility” looms large in students’ consciousness is indicated by the fact, reported earlier, that more than 90 percent of the students strongly agreed or agreed with the statement “In most of my classes there are a small number of students who do most of the talking”