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THE TROUBLE with physics degree courses is that they cram in too much
physics. That, at any rate, is the view of Sir Sam Edwards, Cavendish professor
of physics at Cambridge and President of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science. And he is not alone. The ever-widening horizons
of science, combined with the more prosaic demands of employers and radical
changes in secondary education, are bringing new attention to a problem
that some physics dons have been anxious about for 20 years or more.

Entry to undergraduate courses is the key step on the long road from
the first encounter with science in primary school to the destination of
a few in the research laboratory. Physics is the discipline where the most
soul-searching is going on about just what should go into a first degree.
But the problems of physics are similar to those confronting other science
subjects: there is a vast amount of new science to select from; employers
are constantly calling for higher standards in this or that aspect of the
course; and the advent of unified science in schools, under the new National
Curriculum, along with GCSEs and AS levels, means that the first-year college
class which assembles eagerly for the professor’s opening lecture is likely
to know rather less physics than in the past.

All of these pressures point toward changes in the structure of degree
courses. With the recruitment problems looming in British laboratories over
the next decade (¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 7 and 14 April), it is vital the institutions
making those changes get it right first time.

Even without outside pressures, physicists themselves recognise that
spending three years studying their discipline is not an attractive option.
Edwards’s report on the subject to the University Grants Committee at the
end of 1988 said that students find themselves trapped in courses that are
too ambitious for all but the very brightest. Many good students achieve
‘only a hazy understanding of much of physics, and are left with an undeserved
impression of inferiority’, the report said.

The problem is not so much the level of the material taught, but the
quantity, Edwards believes. Today, he reiterates the message of the report,
saying he feels that ‘the present degree is so overloaded with work that
people are working desperately to keep their heads above water. Half of
most honours classes are simply gasping for air, trying to grasp what they’re
being taught.’ And Edwards speaks from Cambridge, where there is no problem
filling places.

The result, according to Joe Vinen, professor of physics at the University
of Birmingham, is that ‘traditional physics is seen by many students as
difficult and time-consuming; other subjects are less demanding, interfere
less with one’s social life, and often lead to more lucrative careers’.
But, more important, the overloading of courses means that even those who
graduate with honours have been left too little time to think deeply about
the fundamentals of the subject. ‘Most of my colleagues will tell you that
they started learning physics when they started to teach it,’ says Bob Chambers,
professor of physics at the University of Bristol, who started to campaign
for more selective courses as long ago as the late 1960s.

Aside from the growth of knowledge, much has changed since then to make
people more receptive to Chambers’s message. Most significant, and most
recent, have been changes in the schools. The National Curriculum is at
the centre of a set of changes in science education up to 16. The mass of
school pupils will spend more time on science, but all will follow a broader
regime, with more emphasis on process and methods, and less on facts. Many
will follow ‘integrated science’, with no classes in separate disciplines
such as physics, and they will hear more about science and society.

Those who move on to sixth-form physics will thus have less formal knowledge
of the subject than their predecessors, so A-level courses will have to
be changed, too. And, in turn, those who choose to read physics at college
will be starting from a lower base. The government, at Margaret Thatcher’s
behest, has affirmed that none of these changes will be at the expense of
standards. ‘There must not be and will not be dilution of standards,’ the
former education secretary Kenneth Baker told the Royal Society in a debate
on the education of 16- to 19-year-olds last year. But standards and specialist
knowledge are not the same. ‘The level of physics teaching in schools is
going down,’ says Edwards, ‘and the battle for specialisation is being lost
– like it or not.’

A-levels are not everything

In addition, future university and polytechnic classes will contain
larger proportions of students who have arrived by alternative routes to
the traditional A-levels in science. Already, physics has the smallest ratio
of applicants to places of any science, and the projected demographic dip
in numbers of 18-year-olds means that to keep the numbers up, higher education
institutions will have to take in ‘more mature students, and those with
a wider range of qualifications, including vocational qualifications,’ to
use Baker’s words.

The persistent shortage of science teachers, especially in maths and
physics – in spite of government measures such as bursaries for student
teachers in these subjects – also means that many schoolchildren will continue
to get their first grounding in science from teachers unqualified in a science
discipline. The present Under Secretary of State for Education and science,
Alan Howarth, admitted last December that there would still be shortage
of 1500 physics teachers in British schools by 1995. So how can undergraduate
degrees change to make the best of the new intake, and ensure that enough
young people make the next step towards a potential scientific career? Perhaps
the most radical proposal comes from Edwards, drawing on ideas first put
forward by Sir Brian Pippard. The underlying notion is that degree courses
should be shorter: there should be a new decision point, after just two
years instead of the conventional three. ‘People should go into higher education
up to the point at which they want to drop out,’ Edwards says.

That might mean getting a bachelor’s degree of a kind after two years,
‘a good honourable qualification’ after which many students would decide
they knew enough physics and go off to train in accountancy, or whatever
took their fancy. The bachelor’s degree would be more akin to the kind of
education now offered in a good American college. For the real physicists,
another two years would earn a master’s degree, nearer the standard of the
existing first degrees in, say, West Germany than the present British first
degree. And a further two years might lead to a doctorate, the traditional
licence to move on to independent research.

But there are obvious problems with the simple ‘two plus two plus two’
scheme. When the level of knowledge of new entrants goes down, it would
be hard to follow Edwards’s suggestion and simply stop the first degree
at the level of the current second year. And the idea of a two-year qualification
is a strong challenge to the entrenched habits of degree-awarding institutions
in Britain. You can’t leave a British university after two years now, Edwards
observes, pessimistically: ‘I’d be surprised if anything ever happened.’

Far from considering two-year degrees, the Institute of Physics (IOP)
has looked closely at the possibility of a four-year degree course for England
and Wales. There are precedents for this close to home, notably under the
Scottish system in which all ordinary undergraduates follow four-year courses,
and in subjects such as languages or engineering in the rest of the British
Isles. The institute’s influential report on Physics in Higher Education,
released in 1988, argued that future degree courses must do five things:
allow for the less specialised background of new entrants; do more to convey
the utility of physics; let students see some of the frontiers of the subject
– now normally encountered only in the last six months of a three-year course;
develop communication skills – industry’s strongest plea in the institute’s
surveys; and give a firm basis for future professional work.

The report concluded firmly that ‘it will not be possible to meet these
demands fully within courses of three years’ duration’. But the institute
also suggested that a simple move to a four-year degree was not the answer.
Instead, the report proposed a restructured three-year course, which would
not attempt to give much more than a glimpse of the frontiers, and would
pass by the detailed demands of future professional practice. These would
be followed, for some, by further one-year courses, some looking at frontier
work for prospective researchers, some covering the nitty-gritty of specialised
professional domains – including science teaching, instrumentation and control,
medical or environmental physics, and systems design. Many of these aspects
are already mainly studied on masters’ courses. The institute then left
it open whether the new three-year courses would be regarded as deserving
a pass or an honours degree. But it is plain that PhD candidates would need
the full four years’ preparation before registering for their research degree.

Professors such as Joe Vinen backed the institute line, arguing that
‘the idea that our present first-degree courses provide adequate training
for the professional physicist is largely a myth, and it seems essential
that the provision of that training should be seen in future as the function
of postgraduate courses’. But he said it was hard to see how the IOP’s general
recommendations might bear fruit. British degrees are awarded by largely
autonomous institutions, currently uncertain about the details of their
future finance under the administration of two new funding councils – one
for universities and one for polytechnics. It is not a good time for an
individual college or university to attempt big changes in a high-profile
subject such as physics. At the moment, according to Vinen, ‘people are
tinkering with their courses’, trying to reduce the load on the students
and spend less time on the details. But there are few general trends toward
reform.

One problem is that it is hard to translate a consensus that courses
are too full into a consensus about what to leave out, even within a single
institution. This is a traditional bugbear of curriculum debates. It is
much easier to think of new things to include, and any proposal for a specific
omission tends to awake defenders of the item in question as an essential,
not optional, component of the course. Even the IOP’s proposal to put in
less of the ‘frontier’ work runs up against evidence that this is what attracts
many students onto the courses in the first place. Currently, a typical
degree course might have third-year advanced study options including astrophysics
and astronomy, elementary particle physics and theoretical physics. Surveys
suggest that it is these topics that most often capture the imagination
of future physicists in school, although industry would prefer undergraduates
to focus on semiconductors or computational physics.

The IOP, along with the standing committees of physics professors in
universities and polytechnics, has just set up a new working group to try
to find a way round the problems. Fifteen people, including academics, schoolteachers
and industrial physicists, with Bristol’s Bob Chambers in the chair, hope
to report in the summer on the shape the physics degree might take. Vinen,
chairman of an earlier committee looking at 16-19 education and a member
of the new group, says it needs to take ‘quite a radical look’ at existing
courses.

Chambers himself reckons there are a number of points committee members
all agreed on before they began. They include the need to respond to the
fact that ‘students coming into higher education will not have the same
depth of preparation in physics or maths as in the past’, the wish to bring
British qualifications more closely in line with other European countries
to ease mutual recognition after 1992, and a sympathy for the IOP report.
Chambers says he is very attracted to something like the three-plus-one
scheme, though the new group will not attempt to prescribe detailed syllabuses.
The new fourth-year options for the minority would bring students up to
a little above the current first degree, but not to MSc level, he believes.

One strong influence on the group is likely to be the experience of
physics teachers in polytechnics, who have probably devoted more effort
to meeting the needs of less well-prepared students than their university
colleagues, largely because the polys started recruiting them earlier. John
Coleman, head of applied physics at Coventry Polytechnic and chairman of
the committee of heads of polytechnic physics departments, is part of Chamber’s
group, and also sees the need for ‘a radical look at the content of degree
courses, with a view to a substantial reduction’.

But the polytechnics’ experience is promising when it comes to coping
with the future school-leaver who will have done ‘an awful lot less physics
at A-level’, Coleman believes. ‘We have shown already that, certainly at
the lower grades of A-level, the correlation between entry grade and class
of degree is low,’ he says. The trick of transforming less well-qualified,
but not necessarily less able, customers into worthy degree-holders is achieved
‘with no single secret weapon, just a combination of things’.

For instance, many a university teacher might assume that the A-level
course’s definition of an electric field was adequate for moving on to the
next step. But Coleman reckons that it is usually poorly understood by students,
so his course starts with a review from the beginning. The same applies
to Newton’s laws of motion in mechanics. This is the kind of teaching which
every college and university will have to get used to. But it all takes
time and, significantly, works well in the smaller groups which tend to
confront the lecturer in polytechnics.

This still leaves open the right trade-off between breadth and depth
in a restructured three-year course. As Coleman puts it, the debate turns
on whether there is ‘a certain minimum level of knowledge which we must
assume anyone must have who has a degree in physics’.

At the moment, he suggests, it is not clear what the answer must be,
or even whether it is enforceable. Chambers also urges the need for debate,
but after 20 years is convinced that those who agree with him about the
need to cut courses ‘are never going to teach our colleagues to teach less’.
The task of his group is to persuade them that the extras can be taught
in the ‘plus one’ year. Then, says Chambers, ‘I would hope and pray that
we could use the three years to educate people, instead of merely stuffing
them like a Strasbourg goose.’

Jon Turney writes for the Times Higher Education Supplement