Florida’s governor is in an artillery duel with the College Board, the organization that provides AP course materials and the AP exams that so many Florida students have taken during the last twenty years.
Arguing that Florida could walk away from both the AP program and the College Board’s college entrance exam, the SAT, the governor said “there are probably other vendors who may be able to do that job as good or maybe even a lot better”. (Tampa Bay Times article here)
Are there? Would Florida’s high school physics teachers and students and even the professors at the state’s universities be just as happy without AP physics courses?
Whenever I say something nice about the AP Physics 1 and 2 courses, I am bombarded with tweets arguing that the College Board is a corrupt organization that pays its CEO too much, that the passing rates on the AP Physics 1 exam are too low and that AP Physics 1 is a terrible first-year physics course. Even though I agree with those folks somewhat – AP Physics 1 is a terrible first-year physics course – I would urge them to curb their schadenfreude.
AP Physics 1 was invented with an identity crisis. It is supposed to be equivalent to a rigorous version of an algebra-based first-semester college physics class, which only poorly advised students take as a first physics course (although about half of the students taking the first-semester algebra-based class here at FSU haven’t had a previous physics class in high school or elsewhere). It was also supposed to be a replacement for Honors Physics. When you have a physics course torn between being a first physics class and a college physics class for STEM majors, what do you get? You get a 40% passing rate, which is too low.
[Hint: Best if a student takes AP Physics 1 as a second high school physics course.]
I’m going to step back here and start from the basics. In the fall of 2021, 5,653 students in Florida’s public high schools were enrolled in AP Physics 1. From this, we can see that AP Physics 1 never put a big dent in the Honors Physics enrollment (22,556 in Honors Physics 1). In addition, 649 students were enrolled in AP Physics 2 (equivalent to a second-semester algebra-based college physics course), 1,136 were enrolled in AP Physics C Mechanics (equivalent to a first-semester calculus-based college physics course) and 183 in AP Physics C Electricity and Magnetism (second-semester calculus-based college physics course). The total, 7,621, is still a relatively low percentage of the roughly 40,000 public high school students who were taking some sort of physics course in the fall of 2021.
Are IB and AICE physics courses reasonable replacements for AP physics courses? Would they even be available to the majority of students in Florida?
Let’s start with IB. One problem inherent to the design of IB is that it encourages students to concentrate on one or two sciences and ignore everything else. Here is one practical consequence of that design: There are 76 IB public high schools in Florida. In the spring of 2022 (the latest for which data have been released by the FLDOE), only 18 offered IB Physics 1. I’m going to list those 18 public IB high schools here, as a way of signaling to school board members and others the problem that most IB programs have. Remember, these are IB public schools that DID offer IB Physics 1, so they deserve a pat on the back:
Bay County: Rutherford High School
Citrus County: Lecanto High School
Duval County: Paxon School for Advanced Studies
Flagler County: Flagler Palm Coast High School
Hillsborough County: Hillsborough High School, King High School, Robinson High School, Strawberry Crest High School
Lee County: Dunbar High School
Martin County: South Fork High School
Orange County: Cypress Creek High School, Evans High School, Jones High School
Osceola County: Gateway High School
Pinellas County: Palm Harbor University High School, St. Petersburg High School
Sarasota County: Venice High School
St. Johns County: Menendez High School
The bottom line is that while IB Physics 1 might be intrinsically equal to (or better than) AP Physics 1, IB systematically discourages its students from preparing properly for college STEM majors.
I’m afraid I don’t have such damning data on AICE Physics. All I have is this: Weirdly, the AICE Physics alumni in my classes generally perform horribly. I don’t know why. The best theory I can come up with is that the AICE Physics course teaches a set of skills that doesn’t help students prepare for a calculus-based college physics class. But the students who pass the AICE exam are convinced they are going to be among the best students in my classroom – and then reality hits about a month into the first semester. I’ve referred to this in weak moments as a self-efficacy crisis, and I don’t even know if I’m using that compound word properly.
[My regular readers – all four of them – already know that I’m really not very nice. At all.]
What does that leave? That leaves a great Honors Physics class taught by a strong high school physics teacher. There is absolutely no reason why a student coming out of an Honors Physics class can’t have the skills (including, but not limited to, an FCI score >15) that sets the student up for success in college physics classrooms like mine.
Oh, I forgot something. Yes, I can hear you. You’re saying, “What about dual enrollment?” My personal experience is that dual enrollment physics alumni don’t perform better in my class than students with no high school physics at all. Fortunately, there is some real data to back up my personal impression. A study of student success in the introductory calculus-based introductory physics course at West Virginia University shows that the correlation coefficient between having physics credit from another college (like dual enrollment) and performance in the West Virginia University class is a little bit negative. That is we can expect that on the average a student who dual enrolls their first physics class in high school will do a tiny bit worse in an introductory calculus-based classroom than a student without any physics in high school at all.
By the way, that same West Virginia University study said that the single strongest predictor for student success in introductory calculus-based college physics is taking an AP physics class in high school and passing the exam. The correlation coefficient is 0.65.
Friends, watch out what you wish for.
Bridge to Tomorrow 