The likelihood that decreasing class sizes will actually be possible is fairly low, though. However, the professor explained that he had a trick that would raise the performance of the students even more than smaller classes. If someone received a paper back with a red "D" on it, they would simply be getting evaluative feedback. That feedback does not give the student anything to build off of. Unaware of what they did wrong or how they could do it better, the student has no real direction given to them.
However, descriptive feedback is much more helpful to the student. This type of feedback lets the students know how well they're doing or how to improve. Whenever a teacher marks an answer wrong without telling the student why, that isn't really doing the student any favors. If the teacher marks the answer wrong, though, and explains to the student why it was wrong, that observation can allow the student to build upon a foundation that was not there before. Obviously, this is going to take more time and effort on the teachers part, but why else would someone teach if not to help out students in the best way they can?
Bill. Good point. Evaluative feedback is crucial, but it can be very difficult when you have over 100 students in your combined classes. When I taught high school, I found it very effective to have rubrics. Some of them were simple, but when the assignment was longer (like a 5 page paper) I found it more helpful to have a more detailed rubric. This way I could still embed some comments in the paper, but the rubric served as a checklist. Instead of marking each comma splice, for example, I could mark one or two, then make the comment next to the "Mechanics" section of the rubric. It requires the student to carefully comb through the paper again. Peer review is also helpful.
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