While most of the 600 or so students in our introductory calculus-level
physics are domestic or Asian or Latin American, we have a few Europeans.
They tend, even when not particularly brilliant students, to be very
logical and systematic in their homework and exam solutions and to have a
very good background in physics. When I ask them, they typically did not
take physics in their last year of school, or the year before, or whatever,
but had some physics every week for many years. Same with chemistry and
biology. I suspect this is a good system, and wish we could incorporate
something of the sort in our educational system. Perhaps this is similar
to some of the "integrated" approaches that have been mentioned.
A foreign student once expressed the opinion to me that students graduating
from US high schools are a couple of years behind their European equivalents,
but that they "catch up" in our universities, which he thought did things
right.
We have a constant battle with admissions over foreign students who had
the equivalent of some of our introductory courses in their secondary
schools, but the university won't recognize them for college credit. They
often take our testout exam and score well. Recently I gave the testout
exams for the two semesters of our introductory calculus course to a
Kenyan student who thought he'd had the equivalent at a Catholic high
school in his country, and was pleasantly surprised that in 8 hours
worth of written exams he made very few errors and wrote beautiful, easy-
to-read solutions. I was impressed and talked to him quite a bit about
his school after seeing how he did.
Laurent Hodges, Professor of Physics lhodges@iastate.edu
12 Physics Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3160
(515) 294-1185 (office) http://www.public.iastate.edu/~lhodges