Math
****
8th Grade: Algebra I
9th: Geometry
10th: Algebra II
11th: PreCal (i.e., Trig and Probability & Statistics)
12th: Calculus

Science
*******
8th Grade: Basic Science (i.e., the Scientific Method, etc.)
9th: Biology
10th: Earth Science & Astronomy
11th: Chemistry
12th: Physics

I know, I’m just dreaming, though.

Yes, I am aware it is the international standard outside of the US. Years ago, I saw the high school Calculus text of a lycee student. It looked a lot like my analysis of real valued functions textbook with half the pages. We don’t do it because we do not limit college prep to the top 5% of tested 10 year olds.

I even read that German colleges are implementing US 4 year programs for their German students because it is more practical.

I do not see the need to imitate the pre college education or the undergraduate education I saw in Europe. I am not sure it is practical to implement the French Lycee, the German Gymnasium or the British A level. I do not recall reading about any Nobel Prize winning Polytechnicians in a very long time.

I do admire a lot of the vocational programs I saw in Europe and I wish we would imitate them here instead.

Scores will no doubt go up in the new watered-down Chemistry courses and Maryland will congratulate itself on its educational “improvement”.

More students should sue their states for failing to provide them with a proper education.

gbl3rd,

This is the international standard for students heading for high level careers in the sciences. Our colleges and universities do not require it because so few American students can meet it.

A Caltech or MIT grad in EE or Physics with a C average and perfect test scores has fewer chances of getting into law school or med school than the product of any college with a puff major, lower test scores, and an A average, no matter how poor the school. The same is true to a lesser extent when comparing a B- grad of engineering at a state school with an A student from an Easy Studies major. There is even econometric research backing up this claim (non-science grade inflation drives people out of science).

So eliminating grade inflation across the board would help a lot by not penalizing science grads and by giving realistic assessments to students in the humanities/social sciences.

I’m a doctor. I’m not a lab scientist by nature, but if the prestige and pay scales of the two professions were reversed, you can bet it would have affected my career choice. It’s not as though every investment banker was born to the job.

Some sciences are more fun than others, IMHO. What I would like to see happen is more high schools offering more of a selection of sciences to appeal to different passions. I suspect at that point you’ll see more would-be scientists come out of the woodwork, so to speak.

One of my roommates now has a daughter in Engineering at the same school. Her comment is that there are too many women who aren’t prepared or motivated in the school.

It does little good to push kids into fields they aren’t interested in. The best you can do is give them a good grounding in math/science and show them some paths that are not shown on TV (i.e. forensics).

That was not what I saw in the early 70s. The ones with High School Calculus were just as confused as those of us taking it cold turkey. Unless they passed the AP test with a 5 they made them start with first semester Calculus. I have always suspected that the quality of their high school instruction was poor, but these were the ones in the upper 2 or 3 percent of their class and were definitely very bright. Another of my theories was they had a hard time getting used to classes of 300 or more. We had dull and poor lecturers with thick accents. We also had the option of ignoring the homework since it was not graded. They gave us the answer book. I might have just have experienced an especially bad example.