My graduate teaching assistants Sogoud and Tristen have helped me rediscover hope in my classroom this semester.

The SCALE-UP instructional model adopted for FSU’s Studio Physics Program is built on a foundation of years of research on teaching and learning at universities around the nation and the culture of respect that exists in my physics department.

But without great graduate teaching assistants, it fails.

This semester, I had great graduate teaching assistants.

Sogoud Sherif and Tristen White made my studio-style calculus-based course in electricity and magnetism a welcoming place for all of my students, coaxing them to push beyond the boundaries of their comfort and confidence.

Occasionally, I was jealous of the way that Sogoud and Tristen earned the students’ trust. Of course, I am in my 60’s and Sogoud and Tristen are (I think, anyway) in their 20’s, so it is easier for students to confide in the two of them than it would be for them to share their learning frustrations with me. But that’s why graduate teaching assistants are so important – because they can relate to students in ways that professors cannot.

I was blessed to have Sogoud not just for this spring semester but also for the fall 2023 semester. She has helped to keep me grounded for this entire academic year.

In closing, I’ll note that the learning gains my students posted this semester were the strongest of any group I’ve had since the pandemic. In fact, their gains were comparable to my stronger classes before the pandemic.

And aside from learning gains, it’s been a privilege to get to know this spring’s students.

Along with the fatigue that the end of this semester has brought, I’ll also carry a candle of hope into the next academic year.

Sogoud Sherif (center, standing)

Tristen White (standing)

Tristen and Sogoud

Will the solar eclipse get your student excited about a career in astronomy or astrophysics? Read this to be prepared…

It’s Monday evening, and your middle or high school student has just decided she or he wants to be an astronomer because of the student’s experience with the solar eclipse.

What advice do you give this student?

Part of your advice should be to take chemistry, physics, precalculus and (if possible) calculus courses in high school to prepare for the rigors of a college astronomy or astrophysics program. The University of Kansas Department of Physics and Astronomy provides this guidance for high school students who are considering an astronomy major:

Astronomy is applied Physics, applied using the tools of advanced mathematics, the technology of modern telescopes, and state-of-the-art computer software. As a high school student, you are encouraged to take any and all math and science classes available that can reasonably fit within your schedule, with an emphasis on Physics and, if possible, Pre-Calculus and Calculus. AP classes in Math or Physics should be taken as a preparation rather than a substitute for university-level classes.

That seems like common sense. And yet students who arrive at my university and select our “Physics and Astrophysics” major are often shocked to learn that the major involves high level mathematics and lots of physics – and not just gazing through telescopes full-time. The gentle reader will not be surprised to learn that students who are blindsided by the mathematical and physics demands of our astrophysics program are generally unsuccessful.

Astronomy and astrophysics are not the only college majors in which students often arrive on our university campus completely unprepared. To a large extent, meteorology is the physics of the atmosphere, and college students choosing this field must be prepared accordingly. The Penn State Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science advises high school students that:

People who major in Meteorology and Atmospheric Science need a strong background in science, mathematics and computer skills. In high school, students should take earth sciences, physics, chemistry and mathematics through at least pre-calculus. Generally, students who have completed a course in calculus and/or a course in computer programming will have an advantage when starting their Meteorology and Atmospheric Science studies.

Is your student considering a college major in engineering? Engineering can be exciting work, but it is also well paid. According to the New York Fed, eight of the ten college majors with the highest early-career median wages in February 2024 were engineering fields. So what should a high school student do to prepare for success in a college engineering program? The American Society for Engineering Education says:

Most engineering schools require four years of math, including Pre-Calculus, although Calculus or AP Calculus is strongly encouraged. Engineering schools are also looking for at least three years of science, including Physics and Chemistry.

At Florida’s public universities, we cannot screen out unprepared students the way that other engineering schools can. So we can’t “require” precalculus, physics and chemistry. But students who arrive in the college physics course that I teach without having taken a high school physics course are much less likely to succeed than students who did take a high school physics course. About one-third of the students who arrive in my first-semester college physics course have not had a high school class in the subject. They earn, on the average, one full letter grade lower than their better prepared classmates. That can be the difference between passing the course and failing, or passing the course but losing a Bright Futures scholarship.

And engineering majors who have to start in a pre-calculus math class are almost certain to take more than four years to graduate.

Taking chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus may seem like a heavy lift for a high school student. But it’s not nearly as heavy as trying to succeed in college STEM classrooms without proper preparation.

If the eclipse or some other event sparks your student’s interest in a science or engineering career, give your student the gift of good advice – particularly about taking challenging math and science courses in high school.

Does the economic status of a high school’s students completely determine course enrollment rates in upper level math and science courses? A look at public high schools in Northwest Florida.

Course enrollment data released by the Florida Department of Education every year show that students who are classified by the state as economically disadvantaged are much less likely to take Advanced Placement courses in chemistry, physics and calculus (and this year precalculus) than students who are not economically disadvantaged.

That result suggests this question: Do high schools with fewer economically disadvantaged students always have higher course enrollment rates in chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus?

Here I will explore that issue by looking at course enrollment data for 38 public high schools in Northwest Florida – a region bounded by Leon and Wakulla Counties on the east and extending all the way to Escambia County, which is bounded on the north and west by Alabama.

[Spoiler Alert: The answer to the question is “no”.]

I started by using the FLDOE’s Fall 2023 school-level course enrollment data to determine course enrollment rates (the percentages of a school’s students taking a subject) for chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus. The course enrollment data include dual enrollment as well as regular high school level courses. The first plot below ranks the 38 public high schools I examined by the sum of the course enrollment rates for the four subjects. The schools I chose generally have 100 or more students in each grade. The five schools with the highest enrollment rate sums include two from Leon County (Chiles and Lincoln), one from Santa Rosa County (Gulf Breeze), one from Okaloosa County (Niceville) and one collegiate school, this one affiliated with Northwest Florida State College in Okaloosa County.

The FLDOE classifies students according to economic status as either economically disadvantaged or non-economically disadvantaged. The criteria that the FLDOE uses for this classification divides the state’s public school students almost exactly in half, so that 50% are classified as economically disadvantaged. The top five schools in the course enrollment rate ranking all have relatively small percentages of students classified as economically disadvantaged. At Chiles, 13% are economically disadvantaged. At Northwest Florida Collegiate, Gulf Breeze, Lincoln and Niceville, the percentages are 19%, 22%, 29% and 18%, respectively.

In the second graph below, I plot the course enrollment rate sum against the percentage of students who are economically disadvantaged. That is, the schools on the left side of the graph have more affluent student bodies, and the schools on the right side have student bodies that are much more economically challenged. By far the most economically challenged school among the 38 I examined is Gadsden County High School, where 91% of the students are classified as economically disadvantaged. Not surprisingly, they are ranked fourth from the bottom by the course enrollment rate sum.

The economic disadvantage plot shows the correlation between enrollment in upper level math and science courses and economic disadvantage that is enshrined in conventional wisdom (which in this case is correct). But even for a given percentage of economic disadvantage, there can be quite a spread in the summed course enrollment rates. I’ll start with the good news. Leon County’s Godby High School has a high economic disadvantage percentage (62%) but also a relatively high course enrollment rate sum (24.4). That not only places Godby far ahead of other schools with economic disadvantage percentages in the 60’s (Rutherford, Walton, Pine Forest and Escambia) but also far ahead of two schools with quite affluent student bodies (North Bay Haven and Destin, at which 22% and 18% of students are economically disadvantaged, respectively).

It would be easy enough for me to wave my hand around and speculate that school culture is the secret sauce that drives even economically disadvantaged high school students into the upper level math and science courses they need to be prepared to succeed in college STEM majors, but the anecdotes I’ve collected over the years are not data. The very best I can do here is to acknowledge the influence of student body economic status on enrollment rates in chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus, but to note that there are other strong influences on student course enrollment patterns and, therefore, on the STEM career opportunities open to students. We should all focus on that latter set of influences.

Show up for class! University leaders and educators should stop deemphasizing classroom instruction.

With very few exceptions, I like the students in my class.

I have colleagues who would do just about anything to avoid teaching the introductory calculus-based physics classes that I teach. These classes are taken by students majoring in engineering, computer science and the mathematical and physical sciences, including physics. So almost none of my students want to do what I do for a living. But that’s OK. They are all interesting human beings, even the few that I never learn to like. I get to know all of them at least a little in my studio-style classroom that holds sixty or seventy students. I get to know some of them pretty well, and that is almost always a gratifying experience.

So it would seem only natural that I want them to show up for class. And mostly they do. On the average, about 90% of my students show up for each of my three-hour classes. Each class period, there are one or two students missing because of illness. Every semester, I have a few who habitually miss class, and they generally perform poorly on the weekly Friday quizzes and final exam that accounts for 70% of the course grade. Of course, they also lose a large chunk of the 25% of the course grade given for in-class activities, including lab exercises and collaborative problem-solving that they do in groups of three.

Teaching a 60-student studio-style introductory physics course is an intense experience. I have seven classroom hours scheduled per week (Six of them with my two graduate TA’s. The seventh is the quiz that I proctor myself.) My students take their quizzes at 9:20 am every Friday morning. With rare exceptions, the graded quizzes are returned to them shortly after 8:00 am during Monday morning’s class.

Given all of this, there is not much I can do for a student who misses a class or quiz. The studio model is built on collaboration within the groups of three students and the well-supported assertion that students generally learn better in groups than on their own. In principle, a student can perform the in-class assignments on their own and turn them in, but they are unlikely to learn nearly as much as they would have if they had worked on the same exercise with their groupmates in class. And of course rescheduling lab activities is pretty much impossible. The bottom line is that missing a class almost always negatively impacts a student’s learning.

Students who are going to be away from campus on quiz day, which is Friday, often ask if they can take the quiz early. But showing a quiz to a student a day or two before the class takes it seems like a terrible idea. As my mother taught me, “Once more than one person knows it, it’s not a secret anymore”. And allowing a student to take the quiz the following week after I’ve already returned the graded quizzes to the rest of the students is an equivalently bad idea.

If a student is going to be away for an official university activity, I offer to negotiate an arrangement with the faculty member accompanying the student to proctor the quiz wherever the student is on Friday. I send the quiz to the faculty member earlier in the week and the faculty member snaps a picture of the completed quiz with her or his cell phone and emails the picture to me. With this arrangement, I can even grade the quiz and return it with the other students’ quizzes on Monday morning. It is a bit of a hassle for the faculty member (or other academic advisor) accompanying the student, but it’s a hassle for me as well. I’m willing to share the responsibility and work involved with accommodating a student’s travel schedule with the faculty member or academic advisor accompanying the student. But I’m not willing to deal on my own with the train wreck that results if a student takes the quiz before Friday or the following week.

All of this is particularly relevant now because we seem to be experiencing a post-pandemic trend in which students, faculty and administrators are taking classwork less seriously than they did five years ago. Club and academic department advisors have always looked for activities on and off campus that they believed would engage and encourage their students. They used to recognize that they had a responsibility to assist their students in meeting the obligations associated with the classes that the students missed because of the activity. That attitude seems to have faded. Now if an advisor pulls a student out of class for an activity, the advisor generally believes it is entirely the class instructor’s responsibility to find a way to allow that student to make up any missed work. And that belief is increasingly backed up by the university administration.

If a course instructor is juggling increasing demands for classwork, quiz and exam make-ups from multiple students who are engaged in multiple activities, that instructor has two choices. First, the instructor can absorb the additional class workload and reduce the amount of effort she or he invests in the research and service activities that are a normal (and presumably valued) part of being a professor. Second, the instructor can reduce the amount of effort being invested in improving student learning to make room for the additional work required to provide make-up opportunities. For example, if weekly quizzes (which are intended to provide frequent timely feedback to students on their progress) generate too many demands for make-up opportunities, the instructor can simply fall back to a more traditional system in which students’ course grades are determined largely by one midterm exam and one final exam. Studio class periods that involve multiple in-class laboratory and collaborative problem-solving assignments can be replaced by traditional lectures. The impact on student learning would be dramatically negative, but these steps would eliminate much of the angst associated with missing classes for student activities.

Some of my K-12 colleagues tell me that academic policy changes like those underway at my university are already in full bloom in their schools. Perhaps the most pernicious such policy is the requirement that students can ask to retake exams or turn in assignments late. Students and their parents are taught in high school that there is no accountability for academic neglect and no reward for being a disciplined student, and they expect this to continue at the university level.

A recent New York Times article on the post-pandemic rise of K-12 absenteeism quotes a Duke University professor saying that during the pandemic “Our relationship with school became optional”. At my university (and probably at many others) we are careening toward a culture in which class is the place to go only if you have absolutely nothing else to do. Our leaders must realize that the classroom is the core of the university learning experience and halt that trend now.

Few students taking dual enrollment courses in Florida’s public high schools are making progress toward STEM bachelors’ degrees

An outside observer might expect that Florida’s aggressive program to dual enroll public high school students in college classes, and in many cases have them awarded A.A. degrees at the same time they receive their high school diplomas, would be good for the state’s pipeline to bachelor’s degree-level STEM careers. But course enrollment statistics recently released by the Florida Department of Education reveal that the dual enrollment program doesn’t make a significant contribution to the Florida’s STEM pipeline.

The 25 most-dual enrolled college courses (a table is shown below) are generally courses that satisfy the state’s general education requirements. The course most dual-enrolled by far in the Fall of 2023 (data provided by the Florida Department of Education) was the first semester English composition class, ENC 1101. Second was College Algebra (MAC 1105), which is a math course that is much lower level than the first calculus course required for many STEM majors (MAC 2311). The only other math courses in the top 25 are Intermediate Algebra (MAT 1033) which is at a still lower level than College Algebra, and Precalculus Algebra (MAC 1140), which is also a course at a lower level than MAC 2311.

The only science course listed in the top 25 is the general education biology class, BSC 1005, although as I’ll explain below the first semester biology class for biology majors has a large enrollment that is masked by variations in course numbering schemes among state colleges.

The foundational science courses taken in college by students majoring in fields like the physical sciences and engineering are the two-semester introductory chemistry sequence, CHM 1045 and CHM 1046, and the two-semester calculus-based introductory physics sequence, PHY 2048C and PHY 2049C. The numbering scheme for these courses varies from institution to institution in the Florida College System. The first digit in the course numbers can be 1 or 2 or even the letter “C”. If I comb the enrollment numbers for these courses and add the enrollments from these different numbering schemes together, I arrive at enrollment totals of 1,124 for CHM 1045, 166 for CHM 1046, 280 for PHY 2048C and 21 for PHY 2049C.

The first two biology courses taken by students majoring in life and health sciences are BSC 2010 and BSC 2011. If I add up the enrollments in these courses over the different numbering schemes, I find 2,216 for BSC 2010 and 313 for BSC 2011. That total for BSC 2010 would put it in the top 25 and would make it the only science course for science majors in the top 25.

It’s also worth addressing the two-semester introductory physics sequence for life and health science majors, PHY 2053C and PHY 2054C. PHY 2053C enrolled only 80 students, while PHY 2054C enrolled only 15.

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned the first calculus course for STEM majors, MAC 2311. If I once again sum over the different course numbering schemes, I arrive at a total enrollment of 716. The second course in the calculus sequence, MAC 2312, enrolled 357.

In math and science courses for aspiring STEM majors, Advanced Placement course remain much more popular than dual enrollment courses. In the plot below, enrollments in dual enrollment courses are compared to those of the corresponding AP courses. Outside of math and science, the first semester college writing course, ENC 1101, which has the highest enrollment of any dual enrollment course at 18,893, is still far behind the AP equivalent, AP English Language and Composition, which had 29,202 students enrolled this past fall.

UCF President says he will dramatically increase the numbers of students earning STEM degrees – but he is ignoring his biggest obstacle

In a recent Orlando Sentinel column, University of Central Florida (UCF) President Alexander Cartwright declared his intention to “grow our capacity to educate students in technology-related programs, engineering, and computer science by 50% — ultimately educating 25,000 students annually in these high-demand disciplines.”

The president’s goal is certainly ambitious. During the 2021-22 academic year, all of the State University System (SUS) institutions together awarded 5,320 bachelors’ degrees in engineering and 3,219 in computing, according to the IPEDS service of the US Department of Education. UCF was the leader among the SUS institutions, with 1,365 engineering B.S. grads and 756 computing B.S. grads. The University of Florida was close behind in engineering grads (1,261) and Florida International University was UCF’s nearest competition for computing grads (667).

But if Cartwright’s UCF is going to make large jumps in its numbers of engineering and computing graduates, it will have to confront a challenge that originates not on its own Orlando campus but instead on the campuses of Florida’s K-12 schools. Our state is notoriously poor at preparing its high school graduates for college majors in engineering, computer science and other math-intensive fields like meteorology and physics.

What should high school students be doing to prepare themselves for these math-intensive STEM majors? The American Society for Engineering Education says that engineering schools are generally looking for students who have taken chemistry, physics, precalculus and, if possible, a year of calculus in high school. The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2019 that the head of UCF Computer Science Department advised high school students who are aspiring to major in computer science to take calculus and physics in high school. Chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus are important for high school students intending to major in meteorology and physics as well.

Unfortunately for President Cartwright and the rest of us who teach students majoring in math-intensive STEM fields, there is a limited pool of Florida high school students who are well prepared to succeed in majors like engineering and computer science. In the fall of 2023, only 4.1 percent of Florida’s public high school students were taking a physics course (data from the Florida Department of Education). The most recent national physics enrollment rate was measured in 2017-2018, when 11.1 percent of American public high school students were taking physics. That same year, 4.7 percent of American public high school students were taking calculus. This past fall, only 2.7 percent of Florida’s public high school students were taking calculus.

Being well-prepared matters. At Florida State University, I teach the introductory physics courses taken by students majoring in engineering, computer science and other math-intensive STEM fields. About one-third of my students did not take a high school physics class. On the average, those students earn a full letter grade lower than students who did take a physics class in high school. A few students without high school physics succeed in my class, anyway. But most students without high school physics end up near the bottom of the grade distribution. Many of these students end up losing their dreams of becoming engineers and scientists. Several studies of the effect of high school course-taking on STEM majors published in leading journals during the last few decades (here and here) show that my experience is typical at colleges and universities around the nation.

If President Cartwright is serious about increasing the number of students earning bachelors’ degrees in engineering and computer science at UCF, he must take on the challenge of increasing the number of high school students who take strong courses in chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus. First of all, that means increasing the number of math and science teachers being prepared at UCF for Florida’s middle and high school classrooms. Cartwright will need help with this from the state’s education policy makers, who must make K-12 teaching a more attractive career. Second, Cartwright should start a program to inform the parents of middle and high school students throughout Florida about the importance of taking chemistry, physics, precalculus and calculus in high school, at least for students who are considering STEM careers. In fact, he should consider giving applicants for admission to UCF extra points for taking these courses.

President Cartwright’s vision is for a university that extends opportunities for lucrative STEM careers to students from a broad range of backgrounds and at the same time fuels the state’s economy. But his present vision betrays a lack of understanding of what it takes to educate students in math-intensive STEM fields. Cartwright should expand the scope of his vision to include improving the K-12 segment of the STEM pipeline so that opportunities for Florida’s students are indeed broadened.

Let’s talk with the parents of high school students about what it takes to succeed in college STEM majors.

I spoke last week to a live audience of about 700 high school students at John I. Leonard High School in West Palm Beach and (I’m told) many more via a livestream at schools around Palm Beach County about the courses they should take in high school to prepare for success as college majors in STEM fields (Brief summary: chemistry, physics, precalculus, calculus). But even as I was speaking, I couldn’t help thinking that this would all be more effective if it were delivered directly to the parents of the students instead of just to the students themselves.

There is strong evidence from the Wisconsin Study of Families and Work on the effectiveness of communicating with parents about the importance of their students’ taking courses on chemistry, physics and upper-level math in high school. The outreach to parents performed in that study not only improved course-taking in those high school subjects but also increased the percentage of students who ultimately ended up in STEM jobs after college.

I’ve had my own remarkable experience with parent outreach. In fall of 2015, counselors at Mosley High School in Lynn Haven asked me to speak directly to parents during an evening event at the school about high school course selection, and we continued those sessions for a few years. When I started, Mosley (which had about 1,700 students) had 151 students enrolled in chemistry, 32 in calculus and six (yes, 6) in physics. Three years later, chemistry and calculus enrollment had doubled, and physics enrollment had increased to (ahem) 173.

I didn’t make that happen by speaking golden words to parents. The most important point about this remarkable transformation is that it was driven by the school’s decision makers, the counselors and administrators, and that I was just an instrument to be used to further their ends. And just to be clear about being an instrument, I had a blast. It felt good to be part of that kind of transformation.

Parent outreach about preparing for STEM careers works. It works dramatically well. And yet, school and district leaders are generally unwilling to give it a try. After all these years, I am still puzzled about the reasons for their reluctance.

Parents not only want their kids to get into good colleges, but they also want their kids to succeed when they arrive at those colleges. Listening to advice from those of us who have seen thousands of students succeed (and not succeed) seems like the most natural thing in the world for those parents. School and district leaders should give parents that opportunity.

Me, addressing students at Palm Beach County’s John I. Leonard High School and, via livestream, other schools in the district, on March 14, 2024.

If so few students in Florida’s public high schools take physics, what do most students take instead?

Update (Monday, 2:40 pm): The SAT scores I quoted for Bright Futures eligibility were incorrect. I have updated this post with the proper scores.

Only 4.1% of the students enrolled in Florida’s public high schools this past fall were taking physics, so it is certain that fewer than one in five graduates from these high schools have taken a physics course. According to the 2019 National High School Physics Survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center, 42% of the national high school graduating class of 2019 had taken at least one physics course. So Florida students are far behind their peers from other states in learning physics in high school.

Florida requires that students in the public high schools take three science courses to graduate. One of those must be a biology course. But in addition to biology, what are students taking? The plot below provides an answer to that question by showing the top 25 science courses in the state’s public high schools ranked by enrollment in the Fall of 2023. The data come from the Florida Department of Education. The red bars show the physics courses that are in the top 25 – Honors Physics 1 and AP Physics 1. Non-Honors Physics did not make the top 25. Interestingly enough, neither did AP Chemistry.

Non-Honors and Honors Biology 1 top the rankings. That is not surprising given the statewide biology graduation requirement. The sum of the enrollments in those two courses is approximately equal to the 200,000 students who graduate from Florida’s public high schools each year. Then enrollments drop off pretty quickly. The Non-Honors Environmental Science course is next, and then Honors and non-Honors Chemistry 1. Enrollment in Honors Physics 1 is more than a factor of three lower than the enrollment in Honors Chemistry 1.

Florida is home to a number of high schools utilizing the dueling European college credit programs, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and the Advanced International Certificate of Education (AICE) program, which is also known as the Cambridge program. No IB science courses make the top 25 (Pre-IB Biology 1 is ranked 25th, but no college credit-earning IB courses make the list). However, two AS-level AICE courses make the list – Marine Science and Environmental Management. Interestingly enough, of the six AICE AS-level science courses (Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Management, Marine Science and Physics), Marine Science and Environmental Management have the highest international exam failure rates (42.3% and 36.8%, respectively). At 31.0%, Computer Science isn’t far behind. But Biology (20.3%), Chemistry (12.8%) and Physics (13.9%) have much lower failure rates.

Financial incentives to students, teachers and schools drive students into AICE (and IB) science courses. A student who earns an AICE “diploma” by passing six AICE exams (in any subject mix) automatically earns a Bright Futures scholarship, which is Florida’s lottery-funded “merit” scholarship program. The same is true for an IB diploma. Students who do not earn an AICE or IB diploma must achieve qualifying scores on the SAT, ACT or Classic Learning Test (CLT). To earn a scholarship for 100% of tuition and fees, a student must achieve a score that is in the 89th percentile. For the SAT, that is presently 1340. A scholarship for 75% of tuition and fees requires a score in the 75th percentile, which for the SAT is presently 1210. AICE and IB diploma awardees do not have to sweat out standardized tests to earn their scholarships.

If a student passes an AICE exam (or an IB exam), both the student’s teacher and school earn bonuses. There is an extra bit of cash if the student happens to be at a high school earning a “D” or “F” school grade from the FLDOE. In addition, students can earn “acceleration credits” for their schools by passing AICE or IB exams.

The bonus system for both teachers and schools also applies to AP exams. However, the passing rates for most AP math and science exams are significantly lower than the passing rates for most AICE exams.

The bottom line is that a high school in need of resources (and that is all public high schools in Florida) has an incentive to steer students into AICE science courses in which the school’s administration believes that a large number of students will pass the exams.

I visited such a high school last week. It is a large school (more than 3,000 students) in one of the nation’s largest school districts. About two-thirds of the students are classified as economically disadvantaged by the Florida Department of Education (about half statewide are classified as economically disadvantaged). I was told during my visit that the usual science course progression for students in the AICE program is Honors Biology 1 in 9th grade, Honors Chemistry 1 in 10th grade, and AICE Environmental Management and Marine Science 1 courses in 11th and 12th grade (not necessarily in that order). The Fall 2023 enrollments in Honors Biology 1, Honors Chemistry 1, AICE Environmental Management and AICE Marine Science 1 were 287, 209, 163 and 140, respectively. That’s consistent with such a science course progression. The only physics course offered at the school this year is AP Physics 1, which had 18 students in the fall. In 2023, the national pass rate for the AP Physics 1 exam was 45.6%, well below the June 2023 pass rates for AICE Environmental Management (63.2%) and AICE Marine Science 1 (57.7%). In addition, AP Physics 1 requires a level of mathematical competence that is unfortunately less common among Florida students than it is in many other states.

At least there is a physics course offering at the school I visited, which means the school’s administration understands the importance of having that option for students. And the physics teacher there is quite well-qualified. The relatively few physics students are in a good situation.

But the students there who are not taking physics and aspire to attend medical school or pursue other health or STEM careers are putting themselves at a disadvantage. Untangling this problem would mean addressing a system of incentives that seems, for now at least, intractable.

What are the best college majors for salary and underemployment rate? The latest data from the New York Fed.

When it comes to choosing a college major and a career, economic security isn’t everything. But it must be considered.

Every February, the New York Fed releases labor market outcome data that zeroes in on the issue of economic security and college majors. Here are some of their results.

In this year’s data, ten of the top 25 college majors ranked by early-career median wage are engineering majors. In fact, of the top ten, eight are in engineering. Computer science is ranked highly (third), while mathematics and physics are also in the top 20.

The results are similar for mid-career median wage. There are ten engineering majors in the top 25 – in fact, they are all in the top 16. Computer science drops to sixth, while physics and mathematics are still in the top 20.

Nine engineering disciplines are among the twenty-five majors with the lowest underemployment rates. Computer science is sixth, while mathematics is also among the twenty-five lowest-underemployment rate majors. Physics is not in the top 25 for this metric. Instead, it is twenty-sixth, just off the list shown.

The definition of underemployment rate according to the New York Fed:

The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor’s degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job.

Academic dishonesty, the future of artificial intelligence and physics learning – what I learned from an MIT physics professor

I assign homework problems on online courseware to the students in my calculus-based introductory physics classes to give them opportunities to learn. The homework is intended to enrich the learning they gain by doing collaborative lab and problem-solving exercises during our three-hour studio class periods that meet twice a week.

I’ve always figured that students who want to learn will take their homework problems seriously. Students who short-circuit these homework learning opportunities by lifting solutions from cheating services like Chegg are free to do so, of course. But I hope that more often than not they will be held accountable for their lack of physics understanding on my weekly in-class paper quizzes on which 60% of their grade depends.

I found the message that MIT Emeritus Physics Professor David Pritchard brought to my department during last Thursday’s colloquium talk on the evolution of academic dishonesty in turns comforting and challenging. It was comforting because Pritchard demonstrated that cheating on online homework assignments is strongly correlated with poor performance on the final exams in the physics courses he taught at his university. The challenge was his vision that artificial intelligence tools like GPT, which can be used for cheating, can also be used to improve learning.

Pritchard, who developed the online physics homework system Mastering Physics with his son, identified students in classes using Mastering Physics as homework cheaters if they answered their homework problems within one minute of opening each problem with 100% correctness rates. (Cheating on conceptual questions could not be identified this way)

In the classes that Pritchard studied for cheating, students who cheated on their Mastering Physics problems had a distribution of scores on a pre-test using a standardized assessment (Pritchard used the Mechanics Baseline Test) that was identical to that of those students who didn’t cheat. That is, weaker students were not more likely to cheat than stronger students. The bottom line is that, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, “cheaters gonna cheat”.

When Pritchard analyzed the dependence of final exam grades on several factors including midterm exam grades, online homework scores and pre-test scores, he found that the strongest predictor of a poor final exam score was cheating on the Mastering Physics homework problems. So “cheaters gonna cheat”, but eventually they pay the price for it through poor performance on exams.

For those of us who are Chegg-haters (haters gonna hate, right?), one of the most discouraging developments during the pandemic was the sudden jump in Chegg subscriptions. However, that pandemic-era increase has now been matched by a sharp decrease in Chegg subscriptions driven by the advent of ChatGPT. Cheaters are still gonna cheat, but now many of them are cheating with ChatGPT instead of Chegg. And cheating with ChatGPT is just as bad for student learning as cheating with Chegg.

But Pritchard has a vision for how the use of AI in the classroom can improve student learning instead of harming it. The night before a homework assignment is due, have students explain the difficulties they are having with to an AI. The AI can then summarize the student issues to the instructor, who reads the summary before going to teach his class and adjusts his instruction to deal with the student problems.

The overarching conclusion from all of this is that it is unlikely that AI will ever replace the human instructor completely. It is almost certain that human instructors will harness AI to improve their instruction. But until human relationships become unimportant in student learning – and that will never happen – the human instructor will play the leading role in the classroom.

MIT Emeritus Physics Professor David Pritchard addresses the FSU Physics Department during a colloquium talk on March 7, 2024.