Re: Syllabus for AP physics

[Phil Parker <PPARKER@TWSUVM.UC.TWSU.EDU>]

> Date:    Tue, 26 Jan 1999 16:01:52 -0500
> From:    Hugh Haskell <haskell@ODIE.NCSSM.EDU>
>
> Now for the soap-box bit. How do we get around the lack of a national
> curriculum? I don't want to leave that to ETS. But I am told that at one
> point, around the turn of the last century, Harvard issued the edict that
> anyone who expected to be admitted there had to have a certain list of
> courses, including physics. This immediately led to a great increase in the
> number of students taking physics. It seems to me that, now that we are a
> society in which almost two thirds of our high school graduates go on to
> college, that the colleges could exercise great control over high school
> curricula, including physics, if they publicly announced what they expected
> their entrants to have mastered before they arrive, and then stuck to their
> guns.
Unfortunately, there will always be state systems where the legislature
dictates the entrance requirements (**IF ANY**) that the state colleges/
universities are permitted to have.  I know because I'm at one of those
schools in one of those states.  After who knows how many years of trying,
last year the Kansas legislature was finally persuaded that it was not a
sin to expect incoming students at the state's three main universities to
have some minimal prerequisites beyond a Kansas HS diploma in hand before
being admitted.  In short, the trickle-down effect doesn't work outside
the orbit of the more exclusive institutions.  I wish it did.

PS  I forgot to mention that they also made some additional requirements
    for HS diplomas: now one must have *some* science and math past 8th
    grade in order to get one.

---------------------------------------------
Phil Parker        pparker@twsuvm.uc.twsu.edu
Random quote for this second:
  I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
  ---E.W. Howe