I saw statistics a week or so ago showing a gradual rise in the percentage of students who take calculus in high school, a gradual rise in the percentage who take Algebra 1 in eighth grade (instead of in 9th, 10th, etc.), and other stats that would seem to imply a gradual increase in math ability for any given age cohort. Yet, within a day or two, I also saw stats showing a gradual decrease in math ability for high school graduates entering college. In 1995, the College Board could no longer continue with the old SAT and had to "renormalize" it to get the mean score back up to 500. They had to dumb it down, in other words.
I've seen stats and reports from other countries (including Japan) that show the same trends. People demand that the schools do a better job of getting kids ready for college by, for example, having more of them take algebra in 8th grade. So, it happens, except that they aren't really any better prepared than before, so to prevent the embarrassment of rising failure rates, the course has to be dumbed down. The apparent increase in math ability is achieved by a relabeling of what they do, not by an increase in how much they learn. There is now a growing trend in Illinois for students (I assume from Chicago) to take calculus in high school and then end up in remedial math in college. They're not learning anything, but for political reasons they are given classes labeled "calculus" to show "progress toward social justice". I assume Illinois is representative of many other places in many countries.
Of course, what actually happened was twofold:
1. "Teaching to the test," i.e., narrowing a broad subject area like Calculus down to whatever aspects would be covered on a standardized AP exam.
2. Following from the above, a reduction in foundational and principle education in favor of problem-based education. Kids would learn the what of the formulas, but not the why. Kids could calculate a derivative, but they couldn't tell you what it meant or why they would ever need to do so.
The result? A vicious cycle. Subjects narrowed and became divorced from their foundational purposes, which accordingly made them more about rote than about thinking, which made them less engaging subjects, which in turn discouraged student interest, which in turn led to declining scores. And the cycle repeated itself.
Yet all the time that grades are going up, lecturers are complaining that the quality of freshers is going down, in terms of the level of literacy and numeracy that would be expected in previous years, and that most of the first year must be devoted to remedial teaching, filling in the material that wasn't covered in A-levels.
The International Baccalaureate is operated by an independent non-profit organization in Switzerland whose reputation rests not on conning the voters but on being the real "gold standard". Education is too important to be trusted to politicians.
Schools in the UK have the power to do the IB instead of A-levels but are strongly discouraged from doing so via the central funding mechanism, this is for ideological reasons, the New Labour government felt it was "divisive". Hopefully the current lot, who are all about decentralized decision making, will allow it.
HS graduation rates may be higher today but I'm not sure that correlates with greater mastery of basic intellectual skills.
This also helps explain the increasing reliance on college degrees (any degree) as a necessary prerequisite credential for many office and knowledge worker jobs.
So while you do learn less in the first year than the other two, it still has a lot of value, because you learn how to learn and many other personal skills which are critical for university and later life.
But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at least full time if not more.
So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be in uni for longer.
In theory it sounds great, and I was quite excited about doing some electrical engineering. But in fact it was just a 6 month long, highschool physics course on electricity, drawn out more than I thought possible. Spending an entire week on Ohm's law in University engineering is stupid.
Some of the maths was repeated but really helped me get a better grasp on it. The physics class was the only physics I got exposed to in uni and was hard but rewarding, same with the circuits stuff for electronics. As opposed to some of my recent 4th year classes, which have actually been a waste of time.
But my friend, who is going to school in his town is finding the first (and even the second) year pretty useless. And it was sad that his freshman English class consisted of determining correct comma placement. I hope it's just the school and not the dumbing down of education across the board. So scary.
I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was new to me.
The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about 80% of the modules were considered 'core'.
That's one messed up ramp.
But I saw with many (not all) of my classmates just how important that first year was. Unfortunately, the differences between people's high school educations were just so much (there were some people who were having problems with limits... I was breezing all the way up to multi variable calculus and linear algebra) that as useless as individual courses may be for individual students, taken as a whole (as a class), all those 'review' classes were definitely necessary to prevent massive massive 2nd year fail rates.
Unfortunately this is not a problem that can only be solved by universities. They have their role to play, but so does our (by this I mean our province's) high school curriculum. In Toronto (where I grew up), we had integration (and almost derivatives) ripped out of standard grade 12 calculus (as well as a series of similar neuterings in other subjects). To get that stuff at all, your school had to offer honors, AP, or IB calculus or w/e. I lucked out with AP being available (which despite all the taunting I directed at the College Board did actually set me up for my first year university courses). But many bright smart kids just aren't lucky enough to attend to a school with such programs. Or even just average or slightly above average kids weren't pushed by the challenge, or dragged along by their smarter classmates.
In the end, (at least in Canada), I cannot see first year becoming any harder (or useful) until universities know that enough of their enrollees will be knowledgeable enough. Because ultimately, they are run as businesses on some level, and have to keep a float. Which is the biggest shame.
Coincidentally, I have not taken a summer break from classes for 3 years now.
Example: I had 2 dorm friends with 1600 SAT scores that wasted their life away that first year because they already knew the material (like most of us). They got cocky and promptly got a 1.0 the next year when they finally had to work but didn't realize it, losing their scholarships. Freshman year is the best time to pump students with work because they are expecting/wanting a challenge. The first year should be about inspiring students to learn, not teaching them how to deal with insane amounts of free time.
It's difficult to strike a balance between not boring the brightest and losing the less bright completely.
University isn't supposed to be merely a continuation of secondary education.
1.) A part of it is also that one should choose the university one attends carefully - if that's possible. I went to a pure tech school my first year. There was no concern about wasted time in nonessential classes. We jumped right into the mix, taking what was relevant to our majors along with the typical foundational classes - chemistry, calculus and physics.
It takes a very long time to become awesome at something, so I'd suggest you start now while you have plenty of spare time.
Though I do agree that there is a case that too many people are going to university these days. But maybe that's just because I have a degree so I want to create scarcity!
Physics- too much emphasis on theory and step by step problems. I think solving a complete, complex problem shows much more understanding of physics, than the present state, where you can spend a month learning the theory by hard and then solve quite basic problems with lots of guidance, and pass the final exam with a decent grade.
Maths - great, I liked, even if it was hard. Much harder than A levels
Languages B (there a A and B, A meaning that it is intended for native speakers)- they could be a bit harder. It is unnecessary to study to get a decent grade. One can get a 6 or 7 (grades are up to 7) by just attending class.
Languages A- awesome. We didn't lose time learning much about history (there was just enough) like I would have to in the national baccalaureate system in Slovenia, but learned to write and speak. This includes blogs, journal articles, essays, political speeches, presentations...
TOK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_knowledge_(IB_course) The way it was taught at our school it was a waste of time. Apparently the professors were not well trained to teach it. This subject could be of great use if well taught.
Geography was nice and greatly taught, but I think its similar to the national system and the A levels.
What is the outcome of the IB for me? Now I am studying Computing at the public university where I get to meet people from all backgrounds, schools and educational systems. I can tell that I have a much deeper understanding of maths and physics than everyone else who didn't do the IB. Many students don't even understand calculus, complex numbers and vectors. Not to speak about physics. Some went to CS high schools before, but apart from some programming knowledge they lag behind by much. The result is that I am bored in class. We've spent the first month revising what I did in the IB, and we are still gonna do it for quite some time. Plus we learn LESS than in the IB. We don't go as deep.
So yes, I think the first year of university/college is quite a waste of time if you were an IB student and you were quite good.
The first year of university seems to me as a catchup for the 'bad students'. We don't build on what we learned in high school, but instead relearn it with less insight into the principles of the subjects.
The education system, in any country, seems to be particularly vulnerable to capture by bonkers ideologists who prize "equality" and "inclusiveness" above all else, which means dumbing down to the lowest common denominator so everyone can win a prize at the end. It why, no matter what the governments try to do, private education is thriving.