Schools University Physics: Comparing Honours & HL

[l-1j-cho]

How big is the gap between Honours level university physics and IB physics HL ?(or honours math and HL math or further math)

 

[Vanadium 50]

How long is a piece of string?

This depends on the university and to a certain extent, the instructor.

 

[bcrowell]

It might help if you tell us the texts used for both the high school course and the university course. For example, a tough honors course at the university freshman level might use Kleppner and Kolenkow for mechanics and Purcell for E&M.

As Vanadium 50 points out, it's really going to depend a lot on the quality of the high school course. There has been a huge phenomenon within the last 30 years of the watering down of AP courses, so that in many cases you'll have 30 students in an AP class, and maybe one or two will pass the AP exam. I don't know to what extent this is also true of IB.

 

[l-1j-cho]

at our school, we use Giancoli (I don;t know if we recognize this)

 

[jtbell]

Which Giancoli?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0130606200/?tag=pfamazon01-20 (algebra-based)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0131495089/?tag=pfamazon01-20 (calculus-based)

 

[l-1j-cho]

i guess the first one, but 4th edition, published in 1980

 

[thegreenlaser]

It might help if you tell us the texts used for both the high school course and the university course. For example, a tough honors course at the university freshman level might use Kleppner and Kolenkow for mechanics and Purcell for E&M.

As Vanadium 50 points out, it's really going to depend a lot on the quality of the high school course. There has been a huge phenomenon within the last 30 years of the watering down of AP courses, so that in many cases you'll have 30 students in an AP class, and maybe one or two will pass the AP exam. I don't know to what extent this is also true of IB.

I don't know about the US, but in Canada the impression I get is that AP-type courses do little more than give high school students a false sense that they're way ahead of everyone else, when, in reality, a week or two of university classes could easily catch everyone else up. At my school, the kids who took AP classes in high school struggled just as much in first year engineering as everyone else.

 

[Ryker]

I don't know about the US, but in Canada the impression I get is that AP-type courses do little more than give high school students a false sense that they're way ahead of everyone else, when, in reality, a week or two of university classes could easily catch everyone else up. At my school, the kids who took AP classes in high school struggled just as much in first year engineering as everyone else.

Yeah, I agree about Canada and people's approach when having AP classes under their belt. A friend that did his AP's in the US (so sample size = 1) got transfer credit for Calculus, but not for Linear Algebra. So we took the latter together, and while he knew some concepts I didn't, he eventually struggled much more than I did, and was ultimately happy to just finish the course. I can only speculate, but I'm pretty sure part of the reason was that he was too sure of himself due to AP's, and he thought this prepared him better than was actually true. He namely had the same view of Calculus I, which he was glad to get credit for, as he thought he knew all of that stuff already, as well. I don't know what they learned in AP Calculus, but whatever it was, our Calculus professor seemed to think it's not a good thing that students get transfer credit for that and can forego taking Calculus I in university. My friend disagreed with this quite strongly, but I have an equally strong and negative opinion about people getting credit for doing high school courses. To me it seems quite clear these offer a false sense of security, but the substance is lacking.