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



----- 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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