Re: College nowadays - What "should" students know?

[Richard Tarara <rtarara@SAINTMARYS.EDU>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph Bellina <jbellina@saintmarys.edu>

> This is an interesting conversation for me because a similar thing is
> happening at the college level.  The med schools seem to be concerned
> that physics courses are getting watered down, so they are apparently
> now asking for calculus based physics instead of algebra based.  Many of
> the life science students here don't have the background, and symbolic
> manipulation skills to do a good calc based course.  If I spend time
> developing the calculus, I cannot do the more important issues like
> helping them understand physics.  Seems counterproductive to me...unless
> of course they are just asking us to be a filter.
I think the answer is YES (both counteproductive and a filter).  What
quality do we want in our doctors for our old age? {One of my undergraduate
professors--recently retired--who ran the physics program of a large
university's pre-med program advised me several years ago to use no
physician under 40!}  ;-)

Actually this raises a question about pre-med programs.   Is the physics
level in these programs Algebra-based or Calculus based?  Has this changed
over the years?  Is the problem for med-schools that more and more med
students are coming from straight Biology programs where the physics HAS
been traditionally the algebra based?  Is the _average_ algebra-based
physics course today 'watered-down' compared to those of 25 years ago (from
the Med School perspective) perhaps because we are more concerned about a
strong conceptual grasp of the material and may be sacrificing both content
and problem solving in the process?

Rick

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Richard W. Tarara
Department of Chemistry & Physics
Notre Dame, IN 46556
219-284-4664
rtarara@saintmarys.edu

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