

'Brightest girls' among physics A-level dropouts - snowbirdsong
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-27596247

======
vicbrooker
_" "There is a clear advantage to being female to study physics: a greater
chance of top grades and a lower chance of failure and lower grades. This
holds at both AS and A2", says their preliminary paper."_

I'd consider dropping out if my science teacher couldn't distinguish
correlation and causation in their paper.

More seriously, I found the idea that high-performing students are dropping
physics to optimise their overall average as an interesting thing. It's a
shame when students sacrificing knowledge and skills that may have long term
benefits in favour of a short term grade boost.

On another note: wouldn't the majority of students who drop out of physics be
among the 'brightest students' at their school?

~~~
icefox
> short term grade boost

Except to them it isn't. Their entire life they have been playing the grade
game and have learned how to optimize it. Like any group of people given a
metric they will try to game it. Not to mention it isn't like everyone is
telling them that to get a good job they need good grades in college too. Not
one is telling them that the game is about to end.

~~~
keithpeter
[http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/what-maths-a-level-
do...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/what-maths-a-level-doesnt-
necessarily-give-you/)

Above a Field's medal winning mathematician having a conversation with a 17
year old A level student.

Actually, my perception is that the grade gaming started fairly recently in
the UK, around 10 to 15 years ago. The rhetoric of 'raising standards' came to
mean 'more passing and higher grades'.

As regards the parent post's last sentence ('Not one is telling them that the
game is about to end.') _some_ of my brighter Further Education students
(vocational training) seem to have guessed. They are _not_ going to University
directly or at all but via placements in company training programmes or
services training.

~~~
analog31
This is really sad because I clearly remember all the way back to high school
calculus class and again in college that we spent a lot of time with the
definition of the derivative, deriving the rules before applying them, and
having that whole business be on the test along with the regular plug-and-chug
problems. It was at a liberal arts college. Roughly half of the math majors
were headed into high school teaching, the other half were double majors with
some other STEM discipline.

~~~
keithpeter
Well good for you and your teachers.

I'll bet you were not taking nationally defined exams which do not stress
derivation from first principles however...

~~~
analog31
That's definitely the case. It was the early 80's. Calculus in high school was
still not widespread. We took it at 7 in the morning, before the regular
school day, from the physics teacher who was delighted to finally teach
calculus for the first time ever. He basically followed a mainstream college
curriculum in class.

But the subsequent college course followed the same pattern, and I don't think
it was atypical for the time. It took a couple tries to drive it into my
skull, but I did end up majoring in math.

Turning math into a series of multiple choice questions that are answered by
cranking through memorized algorithms... don't get me started.

~~~
keithpeter
UK does not use MCQ, but the emphasis on age 16 and age 18 exams in Maths is
definitely cranking out the working. Some problem solving, but not so much
proof.

Your experience is a really good illustration of the first phase of what I
think is a common 'pattern' or 'process' in education reform.

Phase 1: An exceptional teacher decides to _do_ something and a group of
highly motivated students (also _self-selected_ students) responds well.
Results are good.

Phase 2: This activity is highlighted as 'good practice' and showcased in
conferences by head teacher/managers

Phase 3: Managers in other institutions say 'we must do this' and impose the
outer form of the activity on staff who are not perhaps thinking of that and
students who are not self-selecting.

Phase 4: Results not so good in copying institutions. Staff blamed. Much
mumbling.

Knowledge is situated and good teachers will modify things to suit _their_
students in _their_ particular institution.

------
zhemao
> some girls might find a very male-oriented physics A-level class "off-
> putting"

Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The result of girls not taking advanced
physics because it is male-dominated is that it continues to be male-
dominated.

Reminds me of my AP Physics C class in high school which had a total of 3
female students in a class of 25.

------
Tycho
_There were 20 or 25 of us. It 's hard to say you don't understand when it's a
really large group.

In A2 it was so much easier when there were only five of us._

What the best way to tackle this asymmetry? Teacher asks the class if they
understand, students who need help stay quiet.

On a side note, I dropped advanced physics at highschool because it was
incredibly boring. Spent ages drawing error bars on graphs, instead of
learning about the laws of nature. It had always been my favourite subject up
to that point.

~~~
DanBC
One thing that people are trying is to just pick people to answer questions.
They don't ask a question and let some one who wants to answer to answer it,
they ask the question and them pick someone to answer it. This means you learn
from the people who don't normally answer whether they understand or not and
you understand where they don't understand.

It needs some shift of expectations. Not knowing the answer to a question is
fine and being allowed to say, in fromt of a bunch of people, that you don't
understand is a good thing.

~~~
trentmb
> One thing that people are trying is to just pick people to answer questions.

Had a professor for my analysis class that stated he'd never seen regular
class attendance drop as quick as when he tried doing this.

As a slower student, I definitely had a tendency to skip these sort of classes
and just go to office hours.

Just an amusing anecdote!

------
lmm
Physics at A-level in the UK suffers greatly from the efforts to keep each
A-level independent, despite the huge overlap between physics and mathematics
(particularly the "further mathematics" A-level). The resulting course is
simultaneously very easy for students who are doing double mathematics, and
very difficult for students who aren't. I wonder how much of the gender
difference in the article is simply due to more girls taking physics without
mathematics (the article mentions those intending to apply for medicine, who
IME usually wouldn't take the mathematics A-level).

------
cafard
The Denver chapter of the Colorado Mountain Club used to (and may still) have
"practice climbs": all climbers were belayed from the top of the pitch. A
fellow I met at one of these said that he considered that he hadn't learned
anything if he didn't fall three times in the course of the day. I would
probably never have been a good rock climber in any case; but had I understood
and embraced that approach, I might have been a better bad one.

------
VLM
Whats the employment outlook for the brightest girls who stay in physics vs
drop out of physics? Just trying to broaden the discussion beyond whats good
for just the people who benefit by physics enrollment (perhaps specifically of
girls).

~~~
rjsw
When I was at school physics A level was done by most people who wanted to do
Medicine.

