This morning our grad studies committee went through our annual
exercise in separating graduate student admission applications
into three piles. I have looked at quite a few transcripts today
and over the years. I think I am well calibrated on what is
actually happening over a wide geographic area, with perhaps a
stronger knowledge of Canada than of some other countries.
My attitudes on grading and (implicitly) inflation were expressed
well by Michael Edmiston, but I will add a negative note based
partly on this morning's experiences. The students who are going
through majors and honors bachelor of science programs in physics
in Canada are, perhaps, not as good as the students who were in
these programs thirty years ago. The best among today's students,
however, are as good as the best of those in the past. There just
are not as many of them any more. I believe that other disciplines
are now attracting very bright students who might have gone into
physics in a previous age. It is my impression that this is also
true in the United States (I'm a native Californian, by the way),
though we had not a single application from the US that made it
to the final fifty or sixty we looked at today. We did have many
high-eighties percentile physics subject GREs from China, however.
Physics is still considered a worthy pursuit for a bright student
in that country, apparently. We have had other good Chinese grad
students in the past (and, of course, a few who looked good but
weren't). I think there has been a real cultural shift away from
the (entirely proper) reverent regard in which physics and
physicists were held after the war. (That's WW2 in my language.)
I think our grades being lower than those in other disciplines
is partly a reflection of this cultural drift, and also in the
attitudes of the students. It is to our credit that we have held
on to our standards.
That said, let me turn to our service courses. I have found some
students (particularly those in the biological sciences) who are
openly hostile to physics. They don't know why they must learn
material in this odious discipline. Others among them are so able
that they learn what we have to teach them so easily that I
suspect I'm not giving them nearly enough! Those are the folks
who (in my chauvinistic opinion) should have gone into physics
instead, and who likely would have done so in 1953, when I did.
Seeing these two populations of physics students tells me that
there is something "wrong". I don't think that academic physics
has been responsible for what has gone wrong, but of course that
is not as important as it is to recognize that we have not done
as well in the eyes of this culture as our previous generation
did.
I will add the obvious disclaimer that what precedes this is all
stream of consciousness musing, only my opinion (which is near
Michael's on matters unstated herein). I must also say that the
subject line of this thread would be somewhat unsettling to me if
I were teaching the introductory course this semester as I did
last semester. I received far too many emails from students who
were similarly "concerned". I like to think (and I firmly
believe) that I was not nearly so concerned about grades when I
was an undergraduate.