Posts by richard padley

Physics GCSE: 'insultingly easy, non scientific, and vague'

Memory vs. Intelligence and Quality vs. Quantity

Memory vs. Intelligence:

There is a significant confusion in the Education system today, which now concludes that students, who can recall facts, are some how good at solving technical problems.

This is seen in society as we hold up winners of the Weakest Link, Brain of Britain or the Peoples Quiz as being 'clever' or 'intelligent'.

People who are good at recalling facts simply have good memory recall, and this does not give any indication of an ability to understand the subject which they are able to recall or demonstrate an ability to solve a problem on the subject matter.

The ability to recall facts about the size of a Planet, or the value of Pi to 20 decimal places does not demonstrate student as being good problem solvers, and is not indicative of whether or not the student is a good Physicist or Mathematician.

The focus today is on sacrificing real science to turn out a mass of students with only a surface understanding of the actual mechanics of how the world works, and how this can be described in a mathematical framework.

Quality vs. Quantity:

In the governments drive to get 'more people into higher education', they have forgotten the single most important fact - not everyone is equal.

The populations IQ exists on a Bell Distribution Curve - this is why it is useful to score students against such a curve -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_curve_grading

This means that only s small proportion of high IQ students get As (2%), then a larger proportion of B's for the next group (14%) and so on with the majority of students being 'average' around the C and D grade.

However, Political Correctness says we should push 50% of students into Higher Education - even though we can clearly see that this means that the majority of those entering university would lack the mental capability of being an academic high performer and be fit to study in such an institution.

Now, any flabby-thinking, half-a-brain thicko can saunter into University and walk out with a Desmond...