152 thoughts on “Deciding between AP Phys 1 and “Traditional Physics”?”

1. The answer also depends on the student’s ability, previous academic experience, and career goals. Evaluate carefully what outcomes are desired. If it’s only exposure to the topic, then take the general course for a taste of what physics is about and avoid complications (like greater time commitment) that are imposed by the AP course.

2. Gary,
   Of course you are right. But I figure the parent knows that ability, academic experience matter.

   What they don’t know is that AP physics 1 does not necessarily require a greater time commitment than traditional physics. It really depends on the school. (Mind you– the schools probably won’t tell you their AP Phys 1 class is not harder than their traditional physics– and they may not even know it. But the fact is, sometimes the traditional physics is just as hard or harder. It covers more topics and the teacher will still do all the algebra and trig. So….? )

   Of course it also depends on the student. No student should take AP Physics 1 unless they are at least ready for algebra II and trig. They will be using some of their algebra II and their trig and if they have any weakness in that regard, they should tak AP Physi 1. In that case, they also shouldn’t take traditional physics– they should look for something that might be called “Conceptual Physics” or “Themed Physics” or similar. Those cover topics without algebra II or trig. (As a result they cover Einstein’s special relativity at the High School very little math level-. This is usually not covered in the other classes. )

   AP Physics C will nearly always require a greater time commitment– but most schools won’t let kids take it until they took at least one pre-req physics class. (Which might be “traditional physics” or “AP Phys 1”!)

   One reason for the difference in time commitment is AP Physics 1 is considered more or less equivalent to 1 semester of college physics and so is tested with 1 test. In contrast AP Physics C — the calculus based class– has two parts. AP Physics C Mechanics is 1 semester of college physics and AP Physics C E/M is a second semester. High schools take a semester for each so those students that two tests at the end of the year.

   The other thing to know: AP Physic C is for “Scientist and Engineers” and by “Scientist” they mean those whose curriculla require calculus based physics. Biologists and pre-med are likely better served taking AP Phys I and II because– eventually– they may want to take an MCAT and so on. They need to see a lot of topics but don’t need to do those in a calculus based way. To advise your kid, get information from universities they hope to apply to and see whether the graduation requirement call for calculus based physics (C). If they don’t, your kids will likely be better prepared for future coursework and grad-school admission tests taking algebra based physics (1 & 2) because of the depth vs. breadth issue.

   .

3. Lucia, Thanks very much for this detailed and insightful analysis. It helps a lot. I will follow up more later.

   JD

4. Lucia writes

   That said: if a kid does get a 4 or 5 on the AP Physics 1 some schools may weight that outcome very favorably for admissions or merit scholarships.

   Here in Australia (specifically Tasmania) we do a Rasch Analysis of all the subjects, their students and results across the State to rank the subjects and ultimately the students and give them an “ATAR” score used for University entrance.

   The basis for the ranking comes from the difficulty of the subjects which is calculated so for us at least, doing well in the more difficult AP Physics 1 would generally yield a better ATAR score and better University entrance options.

   I have no idea what happens in the US as regards scoring to get into University though…

5. TTTM,
   In the US every school is different. Variation is a constant in the US.

   There is a rumor that many schools really like to see that kids took more challenging classes so a B in AP 1 would “count” more than an A in traditional physics. But I suspect that’s not so at many state schools that usually have a fairly simple formula weighting GPA and board scores (SAT, ACT). But that may have changed.

   The fact that variation is constant in the US also means no one could begin to determine which classes are “harder” across the US. We don’t have final tests for each class across the US either.

   To find about about what factors seem to affect admission one really has to talk to a school counselor. I can only give advice on things like (a) what’s in AP physics v. what’s in “other” classes (generally).
   (b) what’s a kid can do to prepare a bit if they are worried what they are taking is especially challenging.
   (c) what info they can ask the school for to help them form their decision.
   Stuff like that.
   College admission– not sure.

   There are a few things that are useful for college admissions– and I’ve read them over time. That is to get a firm record to supplement what your school has. I read someone suggest kids take the “College Board Achievement Tests” as they go along in high school. So for example, if they took biology this year and never plan to take anymore: take the bio achievement test just after they finish bio. Don’t wait. That way you get a fairly good score and it’s recorded. If you wait until late junior year you’ll have forgotten bio. Same with chem and phys and so on. The only reason to wait is if you are going to continue to take more advance subjects in that topic.

   (I took all my college boards on one day sometime either late in junior year. It costs a bit less that way, so a parent on a budget has to think about it. But the kid starts accumulating decent board scores which some schools require and other school will at least consider. And if your scores are bad… don’t send them to the schools that don’t require them! )

6. What do the percentages in the pass table mean? Seems like column headings are missing.

7. Lucia: “There is a rumor that many schools really like to see that kids took more challenging classes so a B in AP 1 would “count” more than an A in traditional physics. But I suspect that’s not so at many state schools that usually have a fairly simple formula weighting GPA and board scores (SAT, ACT). But that may have changed.”

   ….
   This is one of the speculations that has crossed my mind. I would hate for my son to work really hard in a difficult class and get a “B” which would hurt his ability to get a merit scholarship, when he could have gotten an “A” in an easier class, and the easier “A” would benefit him more than the hard “B”. Also, a difficult AP Physics class that takes away from his time to work on other potentially difficult [often AP] classes could negatively affect his grades and his ability to get a merit scholarship. On the other hand, I just talked with my son today, and his attitude is that he is looking forward to the challenge — which is obviously a good attitude.

   ….
   I would add that I successfully gamed my classes in both my undergraduate college and in law school. As an undergraduate, I would typically take 3 serious courses for real learning purposes and one fill-in easy course to enhance my gpa and give me more time to work on the 3 real courses I was taking. This in fact, helped my gpa.

   At law school, I needed something like an average of 13.5 hours per quarter to graduate on time. I decided to take roughly 12 hours per quarter and to simply take one extra quarter of law school because the “extra” 1.5 hours of classes could have been really burdensome for me. The strategy worked because I finished strongly in law school.

   ….
   Also, I will check out your advice to see how many people actually pass the AP Physics 1 test. Thanks again.

   JD

8. My daughter took IB HL physics but wasn’t able to get credit for “Physics II” in college because it wasn’t “calculus physics”. Just keep in mind that if you want to get credit in college so you don’t have to take it again it matters which one you take. The requirements for credit change school to school. I think she needed to have AP physics with a 4 or 5 score to no retake it.

9. JD,
   My impression is that since grade inflation is such a problem and the variability of high schools is large that GPA is not as heavily weighted as it used to be, but they intentionally leave this process opaque so it is really anybody’s guess.
   .
   For FL public universities it was my impression that they knew exactly which high school you went to and how good it was, very much accounted for the level of classes you took (they gave incremental credits for HL and SL IB classes), etc. and took a very hard look at ACT/SAT scores.
   .
   Ultimately the ACT/SAT really mattered most and if you you do good there your GPA was not very relevant, only in borderline cases. Daughter #1 had a very good SAT score and horrible senior high school year (long story…) but got into all state schools, and a very good merit deal for the one she chose.
   .
   I would focus on getting good scores on standardized tests. Average SAT scores of incoming freshman is a stat they all care about.

10. FYI: For type A parents, College Confidential is a warehouse of info.

11. FYI: Example AP exam score vs college credit for UF.
    https://catalog.ufl.edu/ugrad/current/advising/info/AP-examination-credit-info.aspx

12. Tom Scharf,
    Engineers and physicists universally need “calculus based physics”. Liberal arts can nearly always take trigonometry based physics. Other sciences…. depends on the school. At the hard science end you are more likely to be required calculus based; on the ‘softer’ science, trig based will do. Architecture… I don’t know. When I was an undergrad they took trig based but that may no longer be the case.

    One does need to look.
    If a kid was planning to get a liberal arts degree, and could get credit based on a score on the AP 1 and AP 2, I’d say go for it. Even a 5 will mean the engineer has to retake physics because even if the school “give” credit for the class, calc based physics will still be required (unless, possibly, you get some sort of permission waiver from the dean.)

13. Tom-

    The link you gave to credit at UF is useful for those thinking of UF. But that student also needs to look at the requirements to graduate. Suppose, for example, a student is going to UF in Electrical Engineering. They need to look at the requirements for graduation here:
    https://catalog.ufl.edu/ugrad/current/engineering/majors/electrical-engineering.aspx
    They will find the two freshman physics required courses are
    PHY 2048, PHY 2049

    If they look at credit from AP tests, they can get credit for score of 3-5 on PHY 2053/2053L with the AP 1 and PHY 2054/2054L for AP 2 or a score of 3 on the AP Phys C EM/Mech test.

    But they can only get credit for PHY 2048, PHY 2049 with a 3-4 on the AP Phys. C test.
    So: even though UF gives credit for the AP 1 & 2 tests this is of little use to an engineer who will need to take freshman physics anyway. (And they will also discover you can’t actually get credit for both.)

    Taking those is still good for high school students who want a good physics class with some challenge. It can also be helpful to their GPA when they get to college because if they did learn all the physics on AP 1 and 2 they will likely find physics easier than other kids in the class– which will help their GPA. That’s ultimately helpful for getting into grad school and anything where your college GPA matters.

    But the notion that it will help you graduate sooner … well… depends. If part of the goal is to wrack up credits to graduate, they should be aware of this difference. (FWIW: If a kid studying engineering gets a 4 on the AP Physic C tests, I would recommend taking Physics again in college– it will give them a better base for the follow on engineering courses. If the get a 5…. well… actually, it’s a toss up. The cut-off for 5 is something like 60% of the points on the test. Sadly, the kids don’t know if they got 60.1% or 90% on the test. Those who got 90% are ready to move on. Those who got 60.1%.. well… they are smart and know some physics. But they’ll find they are moving on with what is probably an equivalent of a “C” in the college class. They may well be able to work harder and move up– but they’ll be sitting in later classes with students who know undergrad physics at the college “A” level. So it can be a bit tough.)

14. In 1960, Architecture at IIT, U of I, Washington U, and Michigan (midwest schools with which I am familiar) required calculus and calculus based physics of their students.

    It would have been difficult to do the problems in Strength of Materials and Steel and Concrete Structural design without calculus.

    Having taken the hard stuff was some defense from the snickers of the engineers who seemed convinced we architects were all flakes.

    I would hope the curriculum hasn’t changed.

15. TW

    What do the percentages in the pass table mean? Seems like column headings are missing.

    Sorry. The left column of numbers is the % who earned 5s– the maximum score. The right is those who earned 1s, the lowest score.

    Typically, schools that give credit based on this test require a 3 or 4 for credit. But that can vary. Whether a student should use this credit or retake the class is something they should consider based on whether the class is a pre-req to other courses they must continue in.

16. j ferguson,
    When I went to IIT in the late 70s early 80s the architect majors took a different class from engineers. (My roommate and many of the girls on my dorm floor freshman year were architecture students. I know for sure they took different physics classes.)

    That said, I guess I don’t know the content. It may be that the order and distribution of topics was different to accommodate the fact that architects continue with strengths and structures but don’t have strong needs for other things (e.g. circuits, electromagnetic induction, thermo, fluids?)

    It’s likely that no physics topic is utterly useless to architects, but each discipline has to figure out which things need to be covered more heavily and which can be deferred or left as electives.

    Architecture was a very time consuming subject. No one thought it was a cake-walk by any means!

17. Because Lucia’s ***215 comment indicates that getting college credit for an AP physics course is a treacherous affair. Personally, I see little advantage to my son taking a more demanding course. Although he is fairly talented in math (top 6% in Ohio last year) and science (top 2% last year), so far he doesn’t have a strong desire to emphasize math or science courses in college. His main goal is to get college credit for the class, which is clearly iffy.

    ….
    On the other hand, he is reaching the point where he is viewing the AP Physics as a personal challenge to himself, which I am fine with.

    ….
    I am afraid that he will never use the physics. In fact this discussion has got me thinking about Algebra 2, which almost certainly is never used by anyone in their adult life except people in math and science jobs. In fact, I have never used it as an adult.

    Also, thanks again to Lucia and the other commenters, all of whom, have helped greatly.

    JD

18. Hi Lucia,
    I may be mistaken about the physics architects took at some of the other schools. At WU we did take the same Physics (117 not 101) that the Physics majors took. A week’s problem set took me 40 hours. This is where I first ran into study groups. they divied up the problems and shared the results. I had enough trouble absorbing the work of a semester which was spent on wave tank demonstrations that I thought it unwise not to struggle with the problem sets myself. I did not do well.

    There were people who could do the problem sets in an hour or so. They were the Physics majors. They apparently found the work intuitive. The only subject I ever found intuitive was descriptive geometry. I think this is no longer taught in most engine schools.

19. j ferguson

    wave tank demonstrations

    Oh gosh… I remember waves in college. Accompanied by the mysterious– as far as students could tell failed– lab. Knowing how often those are terribly unclear I found this video on standing waves. It’s a string, but every kid who had the pleasure of a lab class where the background and string didn’t contrast, the knobs weren’t close to correctly adjusted and so on should be pointed toward this:

    I never had trouble with my physics homework. But some demons just left you scratching your head.

20. I think it was a Paul Goodman book, ‘Growing up Absurd’. I can tell you from direct experience that Growing up Obtuse is no walk in the park.

    I think our wave tank demos lasted a full semester. Next semester was particle physics. The instructors were writing a textbook which was issued in ring-binder chapters. if you didn’t understand the lectures, the text wasn’t going to help.

    One real benefit of this experience was that I was forced to recognize that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d thought I was.

21. j ferguson,
    I suspect the larger schools– or purely technical ones that might not be huge but have vestigial non-tech departments– have a larger variety of physics classes. Smaller schools may not be able to offer a variety of flavors of physics, which would then mean everyone who takes it takes the same first year physics.

    For example,

    UIUC not only has calculus and algebra based physics, it even has a class called “Physics made Easy”.
    http://physics.illinois.edu/academics/courses/
    I’m certain that’s not what architects take!

    For what it’s worth, I’ve tutored college level algebra based physics and it’s not easy. It’s not even hugely different from calculus based physics and some problems have “hidden” calculus. As in: student learn that ‘displacement’ is the “area under the velocity curve”. In fact: comparing the algebra based physics to calculus based I’m not convinced algebra based is easier because they end up shoving more topics into the same amount of time. This can be head spinning. The fact that you are “spared” the integral formulations does not necessarily make it “easier” (and I think sometimes makes it harder.)

    Oh… it looks like Architecture at UIUC permits students to pick either algebra based or calculus based physics:
    http://www.arch.illinois.edu/degrees/bs-arch-studies#section-1

    MATH 231 or PHYS 101: Calculus II or Physics 101 or 211** (3 or 5 hours)

    Phys 101 is appears to be algebra based. The pre-req is trig, there is no calculus pre or co-req.
    http://physics.illinois.edu/academics/courses/profile/PHYS101
    ” Prerequisite: Trigonometry. “

22. j ferguson

    I think our wave tank demos lasted a full semester. Next semester was particle physics. The instructors were writing a textbook which was issued in ring-binder chapters. if you didn’t understand the lectures, the text wasn’t going to help.

    Particle physics was almost certainly a course that whose content you would never need to apply in architecture. Heck…. very little in mechanical engineering or civil engineering either. Are there exceptions? Of course. Always.

    That said: for me the ‘hard’ course was engineering graphics. All our assignments were to be done on pages taken from a book printed on that cheap sort of paper that “squished” when you pressed a pencil or erased. They guy took off if you
    (a) had visible tracemarks or
    (b)erased and
    (c) for “poor line quality” or running over when tracing and so on.

    This big disadvantage to those of us who’d never had shop or drafting.

    In principle, this was engineering graphics not actually drafting (for which line quality, not erasing and so on is important to making good final drawings. But EG is to an extent to learn how to visualize, create 2-D and 3-D representations of various sorts correctly and so on. There is a slight difference– in principle, you could demonstrate all the visualization aspect in purple crayon on the side of a torn cardboard box. But the grading in the class itself ends up not-so-different if the teacher really valued drafting as drafting. Needless to say: that type of grading must be gone due to 3 letters CAD. )

    Oh… and we had to do all the assignments in class. So: you had to do what you had officially just learned, quickly, in class, doing it right on your first try with fairly high quality drafting technique.

    Had it not been for the “in class” requirement, I would have bought an extra book, done a practice one and redone. But it really wasn’t possible to finish. I got a B– with deductions all for the “poor drafting” aspects. None of the errors were ever application of how to represent things.

23. UF provided a very helpful document that showed what the grade distributions were for people who skipped classes. For example if you skipped Calc 1, and got an AP score of 5 in Cal 2, UF showed you what your likely grades would be in Calc 2 at UF.
    .
    Skipping classes is a mixed bag. You are still typically required to take X hours to graduate and whether the skipped classes count in this total is “it depends”. It can theoretically lower your workload and allow you to take graduate level classes earlier.
    .
    “You should retake Calc 2 anyway”, that’s what I was told by UF. I was the annoying guy who kept asking “why, why, why?” and there really wasn’t a lot of justification here. Theoretically the Calc 2 at college is taught better, but that is about it. You would need to assess whether your high school is deficient. I would not make this an ironclad rule. My daughter skipped Calc 2 without a problem.
    .
    Retaking a class typically leads to an easy A and a better fundamental understanding, so there is that.
    .
    Alternatively classes cost real money, and skipping them allows that money to be diverted to other things.

24. FYI: Grade distributions for starting at Engineering Calc 2 and 3 vs AP scores.
    https://1drv.ms/b/s!AoGdp8Ktf6ey8Bdibytx-xrl7nNc

25. Tom Scharf

    “You should retake Calc 2 anyway”, that’s what I was told by UF. I was the annoying guy who kept asking “why, why, why?” and there really wasn’t a lot of justification here.

    The problem isn’t that highschools don’t teach as well. The problem level of difficulty and the curve for the AP tests.
    On the one hand, the AP tests are not “easy” especially not for high school. But they aren’t hard for real true college. And while a highschool student might assume “5” somehow translates into “A” that is far from true. Schools know that the bottom cut-off for “5” is much more like “C”– at best. This is true even if the school grants credit.

    Here a comment by a guy discussing the cuts
    http://lesswrong.com/lw/ihw/advanced_placement_exam_cutoffs_and_superficial/

    He says

    On an object level, based on my experience taking the AP calculus exams as a high schooler, my experience teaching calculus for three years at University of Illinois, and my revisiting the exams, I think that students who score 90% on an AP calculus exam know the material very well, and that students who score 63% (the lowest percentage needed to get a 5) have only marginal knowledge of the material.

    The problem here is that the student doesn’t know his score. They won’t be told if they got a 63%– and should certainly retake or a 90% and would find retaking the class mostly a waste of time.

    So why do the schools grant credit even for 3s? Lots of reason. First in Illinois, I think the state legislature in its infinite wisdom pass a law saying the public universities would grant some level of credit. Second: suppose the kid was a French major who got a 4 on AP Calc. They technically have it “out of the way”, and that material isn’t really going to matter. The school knows they are a “good student” in the sense of motivated enough to take the class, smart enough to master it somewhat in high school. So they don’t want a policy that will make that student go somewhere else. There may be other reasons.

    Your argument about classes costing money has merit. That’s why the proverbial French major who got the 3 on the Calculus AP test should take the credit and run!

    But if you got a 4 on Calculus AB and are going into math, science or engineering, you should retake the class because your understanding is at “D” level at best.

    And the more AP classes “credit” you have the more of them you should retake — even some classes you got a “5” in. Otherwise freshman year will be hell. (And I’ve had friends whose kids had a heck of a time first year in college. It is actually a dang shame because the kids supposedly “got” 6*4 = 24 hours of “credit” in topic that are pre-requisites from the AP and are now moving into all their sophomore classes with a foundation that is the equivalent of having learned the amount that would be a “C” or “D” as a freshman. That’s hard. Sufficiently so that kids can end up failing, dropping out and so on.)

    Mind you: the caveat would be if you got 90% right on any of these tests. But the AP won’t tell you that. This is a big disservice. Seriously.

26. In summary: If you have a good high school, and do well on the SAT, I say skip as many classes as you can. Keep in mind that colleges take people from a wide variety of high schools and classes like Calc 1, Physics 1, etc. are setup to allow those from poor high schools to be able to cope.
    .
    There are also optional separate SAT subject tests for Physics/Math I/Math II that can be taken as a further guide to your standing.

27. Lucia,
    I don’t know exactly how they grade AP tests. My guess is they have a series of progressively difficult problems. It’s a bit bizarre as you note. A 5 in Physics 1 says you are in the top 5% of test takers. A 5 in Calc AB means you are in the top 48.4%!
    https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Service/2016-AP-Exam-Score-Distributions.php
    .
    The document I included though is more useful if you can find something similar for the target school. 90% of people who got a 4/5 on Calculus BC got a grade of A/B when going straight to Calc 2. It also shows a big drop off for a score of 3.
    .
    It’s a personal decision. Skipping Calc 1 and taking less classes in semester 1 and taking Calc 2 “on schedule” in semester 2 may make things easier. The first year is a huge adjustment and loaded up on credits in not advisable.

28. Tom Scharf

    I don’t know exactly how they grade AP tests. My guess is they have a series of progressively difficult problems.

    I know. And your guess is wrong. All students get identical questions. They are not ordered in degree of difficulty.

    A 5 in Physics 1 says you are in the top 5% of test takers. A 5 in Calc AB means you are in the top 48.4%!

    These are intended as competency tests.

    If you were familiar with what happens in the country, it’s not at all bizarre that 5% of AP Phys 1 students get 5s. What has been happening is that many schools like to say “X%” of their students take AP classes– they don’t then report the score distribution. Some schools just pretty much call the “honors” section of their first physics class “AP” and encourage the kids to take the AP test. The schools will encourage sophomores who took AP 1 as their first introduction to physics take that class and then take the test. Parents and students are under the impression colleges “like” to see kids took the “hardest” class (and perhaps they are right.) So often even kids and parents push to have their kids put in AP 1 instead of “traditional”.

    Meanwhile actual college level assumes many– though perhaps not all– the students have at least had something like “Conceptual Physics”, which some may scoff at as “too easy” but its not inappropriate for a sophomore (though sophomores with better math are better served with “Traditional HS physics.)

    But anyway: you then have a whole bunch of sophomores, and kids who haven’t passed trig or algebra 1 all sitting in a “AP 1” class trying to learn material normally presented to people who already passed their trig or algebra 1 class. Of course the rate of 5s is low.

    Meanwhile, while we do have parents and kids pushing on math, they aren’t taking kids who have not had geometry, trig, algebra II and so on and telling them to take Calculus. The high school kids taking Calculus have had the pre-reqs. The get more 5s on the AP test because their performance is closer to college level.

    Whether this means the over all effect of the AP Physics 1 test is a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know. It does push the schools to offer rigorous physics classes and it does makes kids have a better understanding of whether they know any physics.

    But it’s not suprising the rate of 5s is low.

29. Tom Scharf

    90% of people who got a 4/5 on Calculus BC got a grade of A/B when going straight to Calc 2.

    It’s too bad they didn’t break out the number of A separately from Bs. Many ones who got B’s probably weren’t happy. 🙂

30. lucia,

    One of the bigger mistakes I made as an undergraduate was skipping two quarters of freshman calculus because I did well on the achievement test. The textbook used at Caltech was Apostol, which was very different and much more rigorous than my high school textbook. I could solve problems, but I had little understanding of the process. As a result, I was way behind when I took the third quarter and never did catch up.

31. My daughter was closely tutored in a 1:1 setting by her HS math teacher, finished calculus I, then crashed and burned at Duke Calculus I. She was unprepared and the teacher kidded himself that he was getting the job done. She went from bioengineering to biology with a genetics concentration and ultimately did very well.
    My son went through a similar problem at Cornell. He struggled so hard…but he too overcame and is in a highly technical field dealing with search engine design and optimization. They were both at the best public “magnet schools” available in our area, made great grades, but were not well prepared for the brutal reality of the toughest schools. The point I see being made here, and agree with strongly, is that there is a *lot* of variability between what a particular grade in a particular school system means in comparison to other grades from other schools. This can lead to some stressful surprises for the kids and their families.

32. My experience at university started off very badly. My high school had led me to believe that it was one of the 40 bets in the US. I had taken AP calculus and physics.

    I quickly discovered that the kids from Joplin MO were far better prepared. I somehow got into honors english. There were 3 students from Joplin. Instructor was Stanley Elkin. The Joplin folks had already read almost everything that was mentioned in class, and alas, I had only read about a quarter of them. It was tough.

    After two weeks of Physics 117, I realized I hadn’t really understood calculus either and signed up for that. Dropping Latin helped.

    The reading and problem set load was horrendous for me but not for everyone.

    My Dad (EE from U of Minnesota) was surprised. He was very bright and was likely able to keep up in high school with a couple of hours a night. That was what i was spending but my guess is that he covered a lot more ground in his two hours. And because he’d done it, he assumed I must have been doing it. But i wasn’t and didn’t realize it.

    There’s also something to the idea that if something isn’t difficult, you’re wasting your time.

33. j ferguson,

    One of the things they told us in freshman orientation, besides that only 2 out of 3 entering freshmen were likely to graduate, was that half of us would be in the bottom half of the class and we should learn to deal with that if we wanted to be part of the 2/3’s that graduated. Caltech wasn’t Lake Wobegon. Everyone can’t be above average.

34. j ferguson,
    One difficulty is that all students then to think their school is among the “good” ones. Among other things, teachers tend to suggest this is so. If your school isn’t ranked well on some ranking they’ll say that ranking doesn’t mean anything. It may not, but on the other hand if it is ranked well, they’ll certainly crow that it does mean something.

    Thinking about my advice to JD Ohio — that he should obtain the AP Phys 1 grade distribution for 2015 2016 for his school, it might be nice if parents everywhere colluded to get similar stuff from their schools– assuming it’s available. And once it was obtained it was all stuffed into a shared database so more parents, students, teachers, voters &etc can know.

    I’m not going to begin to pretend those tests are perfect but they are a uniform test across the country and the AP keeps them more or less even year to year. So, it would be interesting info.

35. A student I help brought over her bridge for their class contest so I can see where it broke and the mode of failure. The two of us debated beefing up various parts, but we didn’t have a clue which location has the weakest and reinforcing evenly was going to make the weight pass the limit.

36. This has been a very good thread. If you don’t know whether you will get college credit and you don’t know whether you have learned enough in the AP Physics to not have to retake it, and you don’t plan to major in science or math-type subjects, in my view, a student should simply take “traditional” physics and enjoy it and get a good background. Later on, if one develops a real interest in work that will need difficult physics, that would be the time to take it.

    ….
    There is no reason to kill yourself in high school with a potentially very difficult subject. On the other hand, my son has gotten it in his head that he wants the challenge. I will explain the difficulties and warn him, and if he wants to do it, he is welcome to go ahead.

    JD

37. Tom Scharf, that is for Calc BC, not AB. I suspect self-selection, with only top students taking the test.

38. MikeN/ TomScharf
    Calc BC is a year long class that includes Calc I and Calc II. It covers all or nearly all the topics in UF MAC 2312 which is calc II. So that graph is showing scores in Calc 2 (UF MAC 2312 ) of students who got decent scores on BC– and could have gotten credit for both Calc 1 and Calc 2 (UF MAC 2312 ) and gone on to Calc 3.

    But they chose to retake Calc 2 while taking AP credit for Calc 1. Even though it was a retake, even some who got 5’s on Calc BC got B’s in UF MAC 2312. I think many kids would see this is evidence they should retake some of the material they got credit on.

    What it’s not showing is kids who went ahead, took the full credit for what was supposedly covered in Calc BC and took Calc 3.

    You can compare the two at these links.

    https://math.ufl.edu/files/Milliken-MAC2312.pdf
    http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-course-overviews/ap-calculus-bc-course-overview.pdf

39. lucia,
    It’s not obvious from the titles, but the first graph shows the grades for people who skipped Calc 1 and took Calc 2 (MAC2312).
    .
    The second graph shows the grades for people who skipped both Calc 1, Calc 2 and took Calc 3 (MAC2313).
    .
    The graphs are labelled weird, the MAC2312 shows BC scores, and the MAC2313 shows AB scores which doesn’t make any sense. I suppose they are both BC.
    .
    It’s an interesting story actually. During the engineering presentation they only showed the first graph and said people should not skip Calc 2 even though the syllabus clearly allowed it. I only got the second graph out of them after complaining they were intentionally hiding the info (they were) and not allowing me to make an informed decision. They sent it to me directly.

40. Re: Tom Scharf (Comment #158261)

    In summary: If you have a good high school, and do well on the SAT, I say skip as many classes as you can. Keep in mind that colleges take people from a wide variety of high schools and classes like Calc 1, Physics 1, etc. are setup to allow those from poor high schools to be able to cope.

    I have seen a different strategy in engineering/science freshman courses at “competitive” state universities, where a wide variety of students are admitted but the school also wants to keep up standards. The Calc 1, Physics 1, etc. are set up to be so-called “weeding” classes, with very high fail rates.

41. Re: JD Ohio (Comment #158308)

    There is no reason to kill yourself in high school with a potentially very difficult subject. On the other hand, my son has gotten it in his head that he wants the challenge. I will explain the difficulties and warn him, and if he wants to do it, he is welcome to go ahead.

    There is another factor to weigh, other than college credit and pure challenge: what is the value (to your son) of learning the subject more deeply than might be possible in the “easier” class?

42. Oliver (158393),

    That was my experience as well – back 30 years ago. Calculus and Chemistry were the weed-out courses for engineering and science. There was little outside help at the time and it was definitely sink-or-swim attitude.

    My son went through this last year. He chose to take B/C Calc, mainly because he wanted the challenge. I told him that unless he got a 5, it would be better to retake the course in college. The same situation happened with Chem. About half his classmates – and most of the friends he hung out with – in high school calc and chem were national merit semifinalists, so the peer pressure he felt was to be academically better (he had a 3.94 GPA in high school and that was the lowest among his friends).

    When he got to college and started calc & chem, he appreciated that he had already had much of the information and it made his first semester much easier. Transitioning to college is tough for kids and any way to make it easier – especially when they’re entering a demanding major like engineering – is a step up. He also became the go-to student for kids with questions (which really helped his self-esteem which took a minor beating in high school).

    Where we were shocked, however, was that so few of his other AP credits transferred. He had AP US History, AP Gov and AP Music theory. Of those, he only was allowed to apply one of them for credit. I got the distinct impression that colleges go out of their way to limit the credit afforded through AP classes. I can almost see removing one elective for either APUSH or APGov, but why not even allow another for music theory? It’s so different from the others that it should be allowed to count.

    As for merit scholarships – for state schools they seem to be primarily driven by ACT/SAT scores. There will be a GPA requirement, but I never saw a requirement that it be over 3.5. A 29 on the ACT will get you some tuition money at most state schools. A 32 will get you quite a bit more. A 34 is when they start adding room and board to the packages.

43. DeanP

    AP credits transferred. He had AP US History, AP Gov and AP Music theory.

    Yep.

    Parents hoping to save money and kids hoping to have their credits be of use toward graduation with the goal of saving $$ need to consider whether a particular credit is going to “count”. Often, parents and teachers get bad advice at places like college confidential, where a trove of often kids and other badly informed parents will look at a page somewhere and conclude a kid “will” get credit for zillions of AP classes and the kid will get to graduate early. Quick reading of “rules” makes it seem so.

    General rules they need to think about.

    1) Redundancy can prevent some of the credits from “counting”.

    2) If a course does not match any course at a particular university it will very likely count as a “free elective” or not count at all. This could be what happened with music.

    3) Some majors have lots of “free” electives, some have very few. For example: U of I’s college of Engineering page write
    “In addition all students in engineering curricula have 18 hours of social sciences and humanities electives and at least 6 hours of free electives; those choices are generally not prescribed by the curriculum. ”
    As a rough rule: electives will often be 3 hours courses. So this is 6 ‘stricter’ electives and 2 of “free” ones. If a kid takes lots of AP courses and isn’t careful with their AP choices, they will either use these limits up or exceed them. (Ill considered choices could end up with a kid getting ‘credit’ for 6 courses all of which are “free electives”– and so effectively count as 2 courses toward graduation.)

    If your goal as a parent is to get them to graduate in 6 or 7 semesters to save money, find the graduation requirements for a major of interest at several target schools, find the exact course an AP class aligns with. Then discover in what way that specific university course would count toward graduation in that program. If the course matches a specific class at several of the schools, the risk that it will redundantly fill up the kids very limited number of “free electives” is low.

    If your goal is for your kid to take the most challenging high school classes your school offers (and this is a great goal) let them take the AP classes they like. But be aware that those might not “count” at college or only count as “free electives”.

    For what it’s worth, a similar things happens when kids change majors or transfer schools. Lots of classes “count” as “college credit”, but if a sophomore French major decides to switch to Engineering and hasn’t taken Calculus or Engineering physics they’ll often find they have two years of “college credit” which now fills up all 24 hours of non-STEM electives, and they have bunch of extra hours that are effectively useless when counted toward graduation. If you move from Julliard to MIT lots of your Julliard to MIT lots of your classes may not “count” on your MIT transcript (which is ok. You can send people your Julliard transcript.)

    So even though some material is “college level”, a school might not “count” it at all, or it might accept it as “transfer credit”, but not really count toward graduation. Time to graduation will often now be 6 or 7 semesters: all technical.

44. Tom

    .
    The second graph shows the grades for people who skipped both Calc 1, Calc 2 and took Calc 3 (MAC2313).

    Ahh!! I didn’t see the 2nd one.

    Ok: of those who got 3s on the AP B/C tests only 59% got an A or B on the follow on class. I don’t know other people’s take on that but my take is that 41% of these kids got a C or less. These are kids who thought they were “top drawer” and probably were top drawer, and then they got a grade blowing grade on a required class in a topic for which they have aptitude.

    My view: this tends to show a 3 means “not well prepared” to continue. That is to say: you’ve got the smarter kids in the class now achieving at the C or less level in the follow on class the AP told them they were “prepared” for. They are starting in a hole relative to kids who actually took the University class– and they also have made it more difficult for themselves to get into grad school or get some of the internal scholarships (which pop up sophomore and junior year) because of that dang C or worse. They will look less attractive as interns and so on.

    Basically: A students have turned themselves into C or D students by taking the credit.

    I stick with my pervious view: If you got a 5, it makes sense to take the credit and take the more advanced credit. You risk a B a bit more than if you’d taken the “real” class but perhaps not so much. If you got a 3, retake the class if it’s a pre-req for another class. (Otherwise, take the credit!) If you got a 4– decide your risk tolerance and how hard you want to work. You’ve got a 40% chance of getting a C which is high for a “good” student.)

45. Tom–
    You are certainly correct that the 2nd graph is the more useful information. Kids want to know what they will get if they don’t retake the class. I’m pretty sure the 35% who got the “C” or worse after getting a “4” on the AP B/C test were kicking themselves.

    But it does argue for people who got 5’s moving along. Those who got 5’s and retook were less likely to get an A than if they moved on. This could possibly out of slight boredom or overconfindece that led them to not work examples in a way that allowed them to do problems quickly and confidently on tests. (This happens. I wouldn’t be stunned if you found if 2nd year Physics Ph.D. who got straight A’s in math as undergrads might not blow a few questions on their Calc II or Calc III test if forced to take it without some review of the material before hand. Every major uses some of that math more than others. I mean… don’t ask me to do LaPlace Transforms without refreshing my memory! Heck… I probably did integration by parts faster when I was an undergrad than I do now. Most people probably did. I understand integration by parts– I can explain it. But when test taking, and having just practiced recently, I could do it fast. Or.. omg– worse– integrating things that require with trig substitutions? I’m not fast at that now. )

    Heck… actually, it’s funny. I have a kid whose brother I tutored in Physics, and his dad asked me to help him with math. Since he’s an existing student– I did some “intro to physics” with him before– I was willing. But there are things in Algebra II I definitely need to refresh before covering with him (synthetic division anyone? Not me!) I also need to refresh terminology– like when they say “give answer in standard form, I need to know precisely what that is. (Method: is often find sentence in book and confirm what was my first guess.)

    This kid is good though. Sometimes he’s stumped. Then, I think of a way to start– that turns out not the best first step. We get done, then look at it and say it seemed like an awfully inefficient method. So I think of a different first step, he redoes it. Then he says he’s going to do it the 2nd way. But he’ll always plow through the inefficient way, and then be willing to do it the better way. I’ve had two students who were very much like that. Most don’t want to re-do. Period.

    The funny thing about the other one who did that… she had a problem her teacher did in class. With a L_O_N_G solution. When we finished stuff that puzzled her, she said she understood this problem, but wondered how I would do it (apologizing that it was an especially LONG problem.) Luckily she didn’t show me his solution to pollute my mind. So, two steps: done. She was like…. how can you think of that? My answer: been doing this a long time.

    But then she practiced another one the efficient way. (In fact, her teachers solution was like one of those things you see on tired students tests. It gets there…. but really, sometimes the first step is “pause/look”. )

46. oliver

    I have seen a different strategy in engineering/science freshman courses at “competitive” state universities, where a wide variety of students are admitted but the school also wants to keep up standards. The Calc 1, Physics 1, etc. are set up to be so-called “weeding” classes, with very high fail rates.

    That’s what I see too. Schools don’t bend over backwards to help poorly prepared students in these classes. The classes may have TA’s, but that’s because the classes are generally huge. Obviously, no professor could give significant amount of help to the bottom 10% of students in a 300 student lecture. Even the TA’s don’t have tons of time to give lots and lots and lots of help to those students. Their time is filled doing things like running the lab class, grading (perhaps less with “Mastering physics”) and so on.

47. oliver,
    Totally agree. Physics was THE weeding out class at my school for engineering. Chemistry and Calculus also were hard, but Physics 1/2 took more people out than any other. I suppose it is because it is sort of multi-discipline in a sense.
    .
    Calc 1 at my school didn’t have a steep immediate learning curve, but Calc 2 was straight up. Some of this could be my imagination because I took calculus, chemistry, and physics in high school and people just didn’t skip classes in college in my days, so I repeated all of them.
    .
    I grew up in WV and went to the best school there, but one can imagine that there were plenty of bright people who weren’t ready due to rural schooling. The dropout rate in general was high and the dropouts in engineering were higher. If you made it through the first two years, you were much more likely to make it through the last two.
    .
    A somewhat sad comment is engineering there is the best ticket out of WV, and I’m one of those casualties. My nephew is in engineering there now and I told him “get out of WV when you graduate”.

48. lucia,
    I think the data says if you got a Calc B/C score:
    3 = Do not skip the class
    4 = Close call, look at your SAT/ACT scores
    5 = Safe to skip the class
    .
    Nothing wrong with retaking a class anyway if you want a better understanding, or perhaps it is a critical subject to your major.

49. Graduation requirements and “free” credits at colleges are a huge mess and change considerably from school to school. Humanities credits are wildly applied differently school to school, and even changes within majors. Make no assumptions, read the major requirements carefully.
    .
    My daughter’s roommate had >45 AP credits, but was limited to 45, and that number gets whittled down significantly for her as a physics major. The schools want their money, so you must take (ahem…you must pay for…) a certain number of classes on-site no matter what. In Florida you are required to attend at least one summer session strangely enough.
    .
    Although it’s a Rubik’s Cube of applied complexity, don’t lose sight that it all really boils down to taking harder classes prepares you better for college. Both my daughters went to an IB high school and it was a brutal workload in my view (especially compared to my high school days, ha ha). Probably more than should be necessary for any teenager, but the payoff was an easier transition to college because of applied credits and more importantly study habits that didn’t need to change.

50. Tom,

    Yes. That’s close to what I tell students for Physics most of whom intend to go into a STEM major. The caveat is:

    If the class is a pre-requisite for later classes:

    3: Don’t take the credit. No way. No how. Don’t even dream of it.
    4: Closish call. I lean toward retake. (My husband would say “retake”. Period.)
    5: I say: skip– but bear in mind you may need to work a bit more. (OTOH, kids who got 5s usually know to work. My husband jim still says “retake”!)

    Mind you: if the course is not a pre-requisite for anything, not required for the major and so on, it pretty much becomes:
    3: Take the credit.
    4: Take the credit.
    5: Take the credit.

    The only reason a person might retake is if they know that material will matter when they take a test like the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). In which case, they might want to defer the decision to retake physics until junior or senior year– just before they take the MCAT. Or if their schedule permits, audit course at a junior college during a summer off to “refresh”. Do that the summer before taking the MCAT!

51. Tom

    don’t lose sight that it all really boils down to taking harder classes prepares you better for college.

    Yep. That’s the thing. This needs to be balanced against not taking classes for which you are not qualified.

    With respect to the “Take AP1 vs non AP” the “qualified or not” question often boils down to “math”. Mind you, officially AP1 is not that math intensive, but if your mind can’t do math gynamastics, you’ll have difficulties with the mental juggling involved in the “no math” problems too.

52. Lucia, do you have some example problems that illuminate the math issues? How about:
    A plane heads NE at 100 m/s then there is a wind that is moving E at 10 m/s, what is the new velocity of the plane?

53. MIkeN

    A plane heads NE at 100 m/s then there is a wind that is moving E at 10 m/s, what is the new velocity of the plane?

    Assuming you only want the speed type of problem might be done by students in “Conceptual Physics” (the least math intensive)– but this would be if they did it after the math class in which they learned pythagorean theorem. The very lowest level is to only do 1 -d.

    If the answer requires the magnitude and direction of velocity, this involves some trig. That’s “traditional physics” and above. For the most part, the “traditional physics” linear kinematics problems are similar to the AP 1 ones. It really, truly can be difficult to explain the difference between “traditional phys” and “AP 1” in terms of content because in some sense they could be the same.

    But AP 1 will follow a specific curriculum which means you know the specific topics the teacher must cover. Sometimes “traditional” will do slightly different topics– which might mean “don’t do rotational dynamics” which kids find difficult. But “traditional physics” isn’t as clear cut.

    But really– honestly– I’ve seen “traditional physics” courses that are harder than AP 1 in the sense of exposing kids to more topics. However, I can’t advise those kids to try the AP Phys 1 test because they either didn’t do rotational dynamics at all, didn’t do enough (2 days.) I tutor kids at Benet, and ‘not enough rotational dynamics’ would be the reason I wouldn’t advise them to try the AP Phys 1 test. But their class is just as hard as Naperville North’s AP Phys 1 class. The Naperville North AP 1 kids aren’t going to cover some of the topics the Benet kids do cover.

    If someone was never going to take another physics class in their life but wanted a general exposure to physics concepts the Benet class is better.

    (Benet is a competitive high school to get into. They get the some of the ACT averages in the state– last year their average was 29.1:
    http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/naperville-sun/news/ct-nvs-naperville-act-scores-st-0826-20160824-story.html

    But Naperville North is no slouch of a school. Only one kid has gotten a perfect score on the AP Phys 1 test in its two years of existance. That kid went to Naperville North.)

    Getting back to examples of difficulty: The lowest level of “Conceptual Physics” suitable for Freshman might do things like this:

    “A train travels at a steady 10 m/s for 3 seconds, how far do they travel?” or
    “The distance between Chicago and town X is 15 miles. If the train travels at 10 m/s how long will a trip between the two locations take?”

    1 equation. 1 unknown. No pythagorean theorem.

    Many problems at all levels are also worded to make sure the students learn the distinction between the terms (“distance” and “displacement”), (vector vs scalar) and so on.

54. Effect of winds aloft:

    This is how we used to do it in the air. These things were called prayer wheels.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B

55. I intended velocity to include direction, but if you change the headings, you need trig for the speed as well. When I did it, calculators were allowed, and I just used my HP to convert from radians, add vectors, and convert back.

56. Here’s a very clever website on spurous correlations…

    Some of Michael E Mann’s work comes to mind.

57. I always liked the chart of employees of the Bureau of Labor Statistics broken down by age and sex.

58. Carrick,
    LOL! Those are truly Mannly correlations.

59. MikeN,
    Most classes allow use of calculators with caveats for the type. For the most part, so does the AP — with published caveats. They exclude models that let the kids pre-store alll sorts of formulas and so on. (Rules on calculators occasionally change. So students need to look this up each year. It’s best for their teacher to know.)

    When they don’t use calculators, most physics problems on tests need to stick to 30º, 45º and 60º (like they did before calculators.) The purpose of a physic tests is not to see whether you memorized half-angle formulas and so on.

    Even with calculators many problems on AP tests do use those angles. Many (perhaps most) problems on the multiple choice can be answered by rounding gravity to 10, multiplying or dividing by simple 1 digit values and so on.

    I no longer own a slide-rule. Here’s my guess. Suppose you had two equally physics – knowledgeable kids. One was a 70s kid equipped with a slide-rule ; the other a 2016 kid equipped with a non-graphing non-programmable calculator. Both would be evenly matched on this test.

    Forcing the 2016 kid to use the sliderule would put him at a disavantage not because he is less competent, nor because it’s not as good a tool but because he doesn’t know how to use it. Same for the 70s kid hunting desparately for which buttons to push.

    That doesn’t mean you need homework to be that way– but if you do want your kids to be optimized for test taking, you want them to know this feature and make sure at least some of the problems are like that. They they learn to not waste time hitting buttons all the time.

60. I didn’t click on the link, but it says there are 30,000 spurious correlation graphs total.

61. Recommendation 2: Learn a little physics in a low stakes way the summer before he takes it in High School.

    From personal experience I would highly recommend Recommendation 2.

62. Kenneth,
    Yes. I think a little prep could go a long way for kids taking their first physics class. The difficulty for most kids would be finding something that is organized and permits them to prep. There’s lots of stuff online, but the kids often would need to “assemble” their own curriculum, and that’s pretty ridiculous if they haven’t had physics yet!

63. Funny… I just went looking at stuff.

    * Coursera: One course looks good but kid has to pay for access to quizzes. Consequently I can’t recommend partly because I’m not going to pay for the quizzes to test the class out.

    * EdX: It’s geared as replacements or substitutes for college courses. For purposes of helping ambitious HS students, it’s unfortunate they don’t have “Conceptual Physics” or what was — I think called “physics for poets” back in the day. Edx has good material for home schoolers working on AP Phys 1 or to help kids who are unlucky enough to have a horribel teacher. But it’s not “pre”– so not useful for just developing a broad bu shallow base for a kid will take the real class in the upcoming year. Everything is at too high a level for a kids who want to do “pre-AP1″ or “pre-Traditional Physics”.

    That said: if a kid does end up lost, EDX has a series by Rice University that looks excellent. Each topic in AP 1 is broken into a “course”, so a kids can find that and find reasonable videos if they like. They can take self tests to check their understanding.

    They also have good practice tests for AP Physics 1.

64. My favorite prof told me during his Phd program in paraphrase: that school doesn’t teach you what to know, school teaches you how to learn.

    Take the most difficult class you can, because that is where you will learn. A GPA difference will make no difference in the outcome of your life. A scholarship is money, but cash adversity is its own lesson.

    A bright kid with a good work ethic really can’t go wrong.

    Look at it this way, a kid in high school has just started to really understand the world. Four maybe five years of real world understanding. Really nothing when you are 50 years old.

    For a great student like this one, pick the hardest and least-wrote, least memorizable class. He likely will find a better teacher that way anyhow. I used to take the worst ones in college on purpose — cause they were better.

65. In the spirit of fake news, I thought I’d share a pinnacle moment of the “best” media coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which as we know Trump is un-cancelling.

    This is the Media Monitoring Site, which shows the clip in question aird on Lawrence O’Donnell’s program, with over 1.2 million viewers, in which we learn native Americans sitll hunt for buffalo and float their carcusses over the Red River to their homes.

    http://mms.tveyes.com/PlaybackPortal.aspx?SavedEditID=d92f8c9b-a92f-4f98-bc71-849fa42b0040

    It has some beautiful story about how the natives provide for their families by hunting buffalos:

    The tribes here go hunting for buffalo and they go hunting north of the river. Because the buffalo is so heavy, they kill it and flow it down here and that’s of course, what they feed their families with. What happens when we float that buffalo down the river and the river is full of oil?

    Except this is the 21st century, and nobody hunts buffalos for subsistence now. And Standing Rock doesn’t own any buffalo. They sold them all off, as you can hear the activist explain in this clip:

    “The story is not gonna be good for the locals but for the mainstream it’ll be alright.”

    As is typical of these segments, via production theatrics, they pretend the video is live, but it is just edited to together to give an appearance of a live video feed. You can watch several of the takes here:

    https://content.jwplatform.com/videos/WGvmEd60.mp4

    This all came from Rob Port’s North Dakota blog:

    https://www.sayanythingblog.com/entry/fake-news-msnbc-aired-nodapl-report-buffalo-hunting-even-told-inaccurate/

66. In Alaska some people are licensed to hunt moose and caribou for subsistence…but buffalo don’t go there.

67. Carrick –
    Wow. Just wow. And even if they did have buffalo, asking the question “What happens when we float that buffalo down the river and the river is full of oil?” is just theatricality. If there were a spill which would severely pollute the river — yes, it would be a bad thing. I’d be more concerned with people who might be drawing drinking water from the river though, than game gliding gently down the stream.

68. Carrick,

    +1 at least.

    Bison hunting is still allowed for some herds in Utah, but the permits are tightly controlled. I saw that the Nez Perce tribe is trying to get permission to hunt bison in Yellowstone Park. I doubt they’ll get it, though.

69. DeWitt,
    I don’t know…. the tourists might like to see buffalo slaughertered and butchered by authentic Amerinan natives… sort of line a more modern Jurassic Park.
    .
    Carrick,
    Ya well, it doesn’t have much to do with Trump as an individual; they would be doing all the same sorts of things with any president who favored policies they oppose. Desired ends justify most any means, just as it is with political and religious extremists of every stripe.

70. I understand the Standing Rock tribe used to own a commercial herd of buffalo, which they sometimes “hunted” as part of ceremonial events. But slaughtering a domesticated heard is very different than hunting wild buffalo on the prairie.

    People from the NODAPL were engaged in killing commercially farmed buffalo as well as cattle, but frankly that was just theft.

    Rob Port has some good stories on the DAPL, which put into focus just how jiggered-up this protest is. Here are a couple:

    The pipeline follows existing gas line protest area.

    (There’s also a train trestle there which is used to transport the oil that would be transported with the pipeline. The pipeline is much safer.)

    The (paid by activist organizations) NODAPL protesters may be forced to pay income tax.

    This thing left a legitimate protest status a long time ago and basically became a big “burning man of the north” anarchist hippie commune.

71. SteveF: I think what Trump is doing with respect to the pipelines is great. It was entirely a political decision, probably with an eye on his legacy, for Obama to abandon Keystone and DAPL.

    I’m hopeful on the Wall Street reform. If they can get the H1B visa abuse fixed that’s awesome. Great on rolling back corporate taxes (I think that ends up being a highly regressive “invisible tax”, since individuals pay for corporate tax through the increased cost of goods and services).

    I don’t even have a problem with the immigration “ban” (though I see it as an Obamaesque populist move), just wish it had been rolled out better, and not over-reached at the start.

    Gorsuch even looks good. So maybe he’s turned the corner.

72. Carrick:
    “Gorsuch even looks good.”
    CNN calls him “a jurisprudential rock star.”
    I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t help but like someone who wrote

    There’s an elephant in the room with us today. We have studiously attempted to work our way around it and even left it unremarked. But the fact is Chevron and Brand X (cases establishing broad deference doctrines) permit executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design. Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth.

73. Dang. Edit button is misbehaving, and I messed up the CNN link above:
    http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/02/opinions/gorsuch-is-a-republicans-rock-star-opinion/index.html

74. Floating a buffalo in oil, wouldn’t that just make it easier to cook?

75. Fried buffalo. Sounds mm mm good.

76. Harrold W,
    I like to hope that the ‘bureaucracy deference” cases will be reversed, but I doubt there would be the votes unless one of the ‘progressives’ or ‘moderates’ is replaced by someone like Gorsuch. The truth is Congress should long ago have taken back most of the ‘discretion’ the Court foolishly handed to bureaucrats…. in departments which have become captives of special interests (with EPA being the most obnoxious example). The Court could reverse the earlier rulings, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

77. Carrick,
    The error was lack of explicit exclusion of legal alien residents. Rookie error. I actually think a blizzard of EO’s reversing the most egregious of Obama’s orders is the most politically effective approach. There is only so much the MSM can scream about at one time…. and they are already well into the ‘boy crying wolf’ zone where their screams don’t gather much public attention any more. Obama’s approach was to execute controversial orders with little fanfare…. preferably before a holiday weekend. That is not Trump’s MO. 😏

78. SteveF,

    The DHS initially were going to allow permanent legal residents entry. The WH overruled that. The non-exclusion of permanent legal residents from the effect of the EO was a feature, not a bug. It was also patently illegal.

79. SteveF:

    The error was lack of explicit exclusion of legal alien residents. Rookie error.

    I think there were at least two errors. One was overreach–reportedly, the DHS tried to get them to exclude legal alien residences, and they declined, so that error was unforced. The other was in not having a window between when the EO was announced and when it became effective so that people lives, who were already in travel, wouldn’t be so badly disrupted.

    I’ve reviewed most of the other ones…. other than the controversial (and in my opinion stupid) border wall EO, they seem reasonable.

80. > That is not Trump’s MO.

    You just explained how it is his MO. Each order will get little fanfare in the maelstrom.

81. “What happens when we float that buffalo down the river and the river is full of oil?”

    If this were an AP Physics 2 question, the answer is probably: The buffalo will sink because the specific gravity of oil is less than that of the buffalo.

82. DeWitt,
    “It was also patently illegal.”
    Rookie error.

83. Lucia,
    depends on the oil. when some rudes lose volatile fractions they an becom greater than 1 density.

84. dann cellphome typod!

85. Lucia: “The buffalo will sink because the specific gravity of oil is less than that of the buffalo.”
    I think you’re taking the “river full of oil” too literally…it will be mainly water with a layer of oil floating on top. [Or, as SteveF implies, sinking to the bottom.] So it’s really whether a buffalo is less dense than water. Which is a good question — I don’t think I’ve ever seen a buffalo try to swim in deep water. Time to do an experiment — who’s got a buffalo we can use?

86. …and by the way, is this going to be on the AP test?

87. Doesn’t it also depend on whether or not the oil is boiling? (Silly question, not a real question. I need some fried food.)

88. HaroldW
    Archimedes principle and buoyancy is in the AP Phys 2. But they aren’t expected to know the s.g. of Buffalo or oil by memory.

89. lucia,
    Side note – IMO Archimedes principle and buoyancy are fundamental enough, both practically and historically, that students shouldn’t have to wait to AP 2 to be exposed to them (especially if they are in a “conceptual” physics class).

90. oliver,
    I agree. And yet, it’s not in the AP 1 physics class! They do mostly mechanics topics and then– mysteriously– tack on resistive circuits. They don’t do anything else in EM– just circuits.

    The only kid I’ve tutored who had Archimedes principle in her first contact physics class did conceptual physics. I think it’s the “one equation/one unknown no algebra II, no trig, little geometry” thing. She’s also the only one who learned anything about modulus of elasticity and materials expanding and contracting with temperature.

    Conceptual physics is not a bad class. I think for a lot of kids it should be taught in 8th grade, but it’s not a bad class!

91. I have a question that relates to this AP 1/Traditional Physics course choice for those who teach STEM at colleges, (anyone can answer though). oliver’s question brought it to mind. I’ll preface a bit:

    Physics varies from school to school. Some topics every 1st contact phys. class does (I mentioned them above). So, if a class were to add 3 topics out of the following which would you prefer them to add:

    Archimedes principle.
    Thermal expansion of materials.
    Elasticity (i.e. youngs modulus stuff.)
    Special relativity.
    Electro-statics.
    Magnetism:
    Electro-magnetism.
    Resistive circuits.
    Light: color wavelength
    Geometric optics: reflection/refraction/ lenses.
    Waves (what they are, standing waves, possibly resonance)
    Sound

    All the different schools take different picks some have more topics some have fewer. No first contact physics covers covers all of these (and I realize some might argue where just “magenetism” and “electro magnetism” begins and ends and so forth. )

    Oddly, I don’t necessarily think any choice is “right”. (My usually gripes are teachers who do what I think are ridiculous things within a topic. For example: I think they guy at Hinsdale who has students answer lots of questions about which color on a resistor means what number and so on has silly priorities. That is not of any fundamental importance. Nor is knowing that concert A is 440 Hz, nor is making them have to sit there looking at letters super-imposed on piano keys. )

92. Lucia,
    I suspect that the Hinsdale guy tinkers with hobby electronics kits and programs a piezo to produce musical notes.

93. Waves. If I had to do it, so should everyone else. At the same time it did have pertinence to architecture – think acoustics.

    Some knowledge of waves made it possible to recognize that the violas and cellos in the annual Messiah performance at Rockefeller Chapel at U of C could best be heard in pews in a very small area about 7/8 of the way back and to one side in the nave. I lucked into the location in an early visit, missed it following year and then searched it out and found it in subsequent years. Without the knowledge that such a thing was possible due to the acoustical relationship of the chapel design and the location of the orchestra I would never suspected that where one sat could have a really significant effect on what one heard.

    I suppose that growing up in a house with an active Hi-Fi aficionado inspired the further corruption of generally wanting to re-balance the acoustics during some of the concerts I attend.

    So teach waves.

94. Edit seems not to work this morning.

95. RB,
    Perhaps. But it doesn’t make having students spend time and effort on those two things makes much sense.

    j ferguson,
    I think it’s useful for kids to know that physics and music do interact.
    I think discussion of ‘dead spots’, ‘live spots’ and so on is useful. Just not so sure about kids needed to spend time with questions that ask them to figure out the frequency of a particular note on the piano keyboard using musical notation! That question does apply physics, but in a way where the kids need to learn notation that even the musical students may not know.

96. Waves and anything thermal.

    Waves though for sure. Guitar with an oscilloscope is what I did in 87. Octaves and resonant notes show and sound quite well on the screen and it is totally teacher friendly.

97. It was all so much easier when we took physics in HS during the 70s. No AP offered, just physics 1 and 2. No standardized testing to worry about, just learn the subject matter and test well for your final grade.

    I was fortunate to have a great teacher who utilized a good mix of essential formulas and practical experimentation. The course material was difficult for a 16 yr old brain distracted by fast cars and pretty girls but it was always a lot of fun. It served me well and was good prep for college.

    Wishing the HS students of today the best…

98. Jeff Id,
    If the teacher has an oscillascope, they could show beats too. Possibly dead spots if done correctly.

99. ivp0,
    The AP tests have are both good and bad. On the one hand, they dictate that certain topics be covered and strongly influence order. On the other hand, they dictate that certain topics be covered and strongly influence order.

100. I agree with Jeff ID.
     Waves- light, optics, frequency, spectrum, amplitude, sound, resonance, standing waves, are essential.

     Thermal expansion, Boyle’s law…

101. ivp0

     Boyle’s law

     That might get covered in chemistry. I’m pretty sure it usually is, but I’m not sure.

     Not saying it can’t be covered in both, but there are a few topics I figure the students do cover even if they don’t see them in physics.

102. Lucia,
     Yep, that is probably a crossover topic with elements of both physics and chemistry.

103. ivp0,
     ΔU = c ΔT usually gets covered in chemistry also.

     I think generally, at the high school chemistry level, no distinction between cp and cv is introduced. The distinction does get introduced in AP physics II which includes thermo. As far as I can tell, few schools around here offer AP physics II– Naperville North does offer it. (I’m going to have to look up the statistics for how many kids take the AP Physics II test relative to the I test.)

     (It is rather difficult for schools to be large enough to offer AP P 1, AP P 2, AP C mech, AP C EM and also offer some non-AP level physics. The students going into engineering need the “C” flavor, so I totally understand why schools will offer some ‘intro’ physics classes and then only offer the calculus based for kids who do intend to go on the hard sciences or engineering.)

104. The Washington Times picked up on the buffalo floating down an oil filled river story. They include a number of other annecdotes where the press was just making stuff up.

     http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-plagued-by-fake-new/

105. lucia,

     The weed out course for undergraduate Chemistry majors when I was at Caltech was Physical Chemistry, i.e. thermodynamics. Talking to other Chemistry majors, this seemed to be more or less universal and is probably still true. But that was a junior year course.

106. Weed out course junior year. Wow, that’s late! Not saying it’s wrong, but they survived two years and hit a roadblock junior year. Ouch.

     Some junior year courses did weed out some ME’s. But mostly… not so much. Senior year’s requirement hurdles were ones that involved more of the “long” rather than “hard”.

     Technical electives might be chosen to be hard or less hard.

     But the specific requirement course were often capstone which involves report writing, designing, long experiment and so on. One might be exhausted from the length– and the time constraints, but generally, the material was application of stuff you’d at least theoretically learned. So those rarely “weeded” out anyone.

     I just helped a kid doing his undergrad statics problems– I’d tutored him for the AP Phys C. Statics is where insight/tedium first rears it’s ugly head. That is: If you don’t “get” the insight of where to take moments and how to organize stuff, which thing to try to solve first, the problems are intractable. But even after the “insight” you still have a fair measure of “tedium” to actually get numbers.

     (OK, in principle, you can linear-algebra your way doing stuff a ridiculous way. But you’ll never survive like that.)

107. Lucia, DeWitt,
     Freshman year was the big weed-out year at my undergrad school (Stevens Tech), with a 30% rate. Introductory chemistry, with labs, introductory physics, with labs, and calculus (theorm/proof/theorm/proof/theorm/proof…etc) eliminated the feeble.

108. SteveF,

     People who left Caltech as Freshman or Sophomores were capable of passing. A lot just decided that science was not for them. When I was there, they started offering an economics major to try to keep the numbers up.

     P.Chem is required for an ACS certified BS in Chemistry. If you couldn’t pass PChem, there were other degree options, just not a BS in Chemistry.

109. DeWitt,
     Same at Stevens: ACS accredited degree required pchem (and the connection between statistical mechanics and thermo!), but by junior year, the weak were long gone.

110. DeWitt,
     I wasn’t suggesting a weed-out class senior year was wrong. Just… ouch!

     Offering a major with employment and grad school prospects they can switch too is kind.

111. Lucia,
     FWIW, the flunkout rate junior and senior years at my school was very close to zero. The very high freshmen flunkout rate was due to a combination of ‘preferential admissions’ for disadvantaged students, at about 10%, and kids who could easily have passed, but were unwilling to actually do the work…. no doubt ending up at the NY Times and similar employers for the intellectually lazy.

112. SteveF

     at about 10%, and kids who could easily have passed, but were unwilling to actually do the work

     That’s where “engineering statics” really cuts in. Some of the kids who can easily pass but don’t want to work will make it out of Freshman physics. They crater when the hit statics– which is where you can’t make it through by brains alone.

     Yes, “A” brains always have the edge over “B-D” brains. But in statics a “B” brain who works will do better than an “A” brain who won’t. Heck a “D” brain who works will do better than an “A” brain who won’t. E/F brains will always fail– but at that point, they already have failed– as have most the “D” brains.

113. Lucia,
     With your classification of brains (ABCDEF), I am personally a liitle afraid of your evaluation… that being said, maybe you could work at the education department for Trump… put the fear of Jesus in them for sure.

114. SteveF,
     I don’t think I’m especially ungenerous. But we all know people who could get things fast. And we all know people who got things– but after a fair amount of work. Both count. And really, in the end, no matter how smart you are, you don’t get anywhere without work.

     Engineering statics…. Everyone knows smart kids who plowed through until they hit that. And that’s rarely “brains” it’s the tedium. I still remember doing trusses…. oy. Of course, if you didn’t “get” things you couldn’t do them. But there was a point where you just had to do a certain amount of just… crud.

     I think the same thing happens in most disciplines. I think my sister was like, “distillation columns”…. she switched to premed because it was less tedious, graduated and went into medicine. She said bio — reputed to be “hard” was nothing but memorization…. Easy peasy….

115. FWIW: If you graduated in engineering in any accredited program, brain can’t be less than C. Hard work is hard work.. and in the end, it matters a hell of a lot. but at a certain point, if you can’t process fast enough, some people need to realize they need to apply that hard work to something else.

116. “easy peasy” … a very midwestern expression, and a favorite of the most beautiful woman I ever met… who was from Ohio… and sadly died from breast cancer at 49.😔

117. I wrote a few songs about her… and never will get over her passing.
     .
     Sometimes when I am awaking
     caught between dreams and the day
     That’s when my memories of you are most clear,
     and I think that I lost my way….
     .
     I get up and go through the motions
     Do all the things I must do.
     All through the day my mind wanders…
     I keep remembering you.
     .
     I’ll hold you tonight my love
     hold you in my dreams.
     Until the morning comes
     you’ll be with me.

118. dying young is very sad. . .

119. To add to the practicality of this discussion, I will mention a couple of additional things about my son. I believe I mentioned before that although he has a good deal of talent in math and science (last year he said the Ohio science test was easy), he doesn’t want to major in subjects related to these two disciplines now.

     ….
     He is outgoing and is a very talented filmmaker. (He did his first trailer in the ninth grade last year at his large high school and the teacher said that his trailer was the best ever done in the history of the high school). He likes filmmaking and may want to do something careerwise with it. (not something I would advice him to do, but he has to make these types of choices ultimately)

     ….
     Although he is a good thinker, he is a klutzy, sometimes inefficient writer. Although he has gotten all “A”s in high school English, we both recognize the situation. So, I have gotten him a tutor for English, and the tutor helps a lot. I believe being a good-writer, is the most fundamental academic skill that anyone can have. Before he would be stretching himself in AP Physics, I would want him to master writing.

     ….
     Personally, since, whether he would get college credit for AP Physics is iffy, I lean towards advising him to take “moderate” physics. If later on, he develops a real interest in science or math, he will learn more efficiently if he is emotionally invested in the subject. As I said before, he is currently looking at AP Physics as a challenge, and wants to take it. I am fine with that also.

     ….
     A substantial part of my reason for hoping my son can get as much credit in high school for college as possible is my view that colleges charge too much tuition and take advantage of many students. As much as possible, I don’t want to contribute financially to that situation. If my son can get a merit scholarship all the better.

     ….
     My bottom line on this discussion is that it is good to know that getting college credit for AP Physics is sketchy. Also, it is good to know that preparation over the summer can help students deal with a very challenging subject.

     ….
     From where I sit, I believe my son would be a very good manager of engineering projects because he could understand the math and science and because he is also personable. Also, after following this discussion, I am thinking that architecture might be a good place for him. It is both math and scientifically challenging, and an architect has the opportunity to be creative and artistic.

     JD

120. That’s funny. I thought physics was really hard and statics easy. I can’t remember if we got indeterminate structures in statics or in a later course. I loved indeterminate structures because on the face of it looked impossible but with calculus wasn’t.
     .
     I think you’re right, Lucia, in that with less than A talent, Statics responded to work. Work would only get one so far in physics often not far enough.
     .
     If we’re still considering JD’s kid’s future it might be good for him to think about whether he wants to spend his career with really bright people or ordinary Americans (as Hillary is wont to call them). I say this because I spent parts of my career in two different industries, computer and construction. The folks I worked with in computer industry 1986-1994 seemed much brighter than those in construction (Architecture for sure, as well as most of the rest of it) . The computer people (AutoDesk, Sun Microsystems, Parametric Technology) were a joy to work with. You could have discussions where you only needed to say first sentence of a paragraph, other person ‘got it’ and you could go on to first sentence of next paragraph and so on until you got to the paragraph where the problem was. This was mostly technical.
     .
     I’m pretty sure that the sharpest minds in Law behave similarly. It is a calamity for a bright person to be trapped in a situation where he/she can’t run with things. And this is a lot more likely to happen if you follow a pursuit that doesn’t absolutely DEMAND intelligence. If it doesn’t you are very likely to find yourself reporting to someone who isn’t.
     .
     So I’m with Jeff ID, take the hardest stuff they’ll let you take because that is very likely what the sharpest people are doing and surely you will want to spend your career with them rather than people you have to explain everything to.
     .
     One more thing. High Schoolers frequently make decisions which will affect their choice of careers based on what they find difficult in high school. It’s entirely possible that with a little age and experience those things will not be hard two or three years later – obviously not the same courses, but same subject areas.
     .
     Based on extensive discussions on this subject with other folks my age, the one certain place to get bad career advice is the high school counselor. You may get good advice from the sharper teachers.
     .
     I sat next to a guy at a concert this afternoon whose Winnetka, IL Junior High principal told his parents that he was not susceptable to education. They should forget about college, and maybe even high school graduation. Dyslexia was the problem – a not widely know affliction at the time (early fifties). Of course the Junior High people had no idea that the learning difficulty was tied to high viscosity reading issues. He transferred to Country Day, then went on to BA at Harvard, MBA at Stanford, and from the look of him a happy career and great wealth. He said the dyslexia made it a lot harder, but once he had a grasp that his was a very specific problem he was able to work with it.
     .
     It would also likely be better to go to the best university you can get into. I started and finished at a school that was hard for me. It was so hard that I flunked out after three years and spent a year at a third rate state school (which will remain nameless). There were a few really bright kids there, the faculty had a few stars, but it was more like high school in the sense that if you were interested in what was going on in class you were viewed with contempt by your classmates. There was an incredible amount of cheating there. I always wondered where the cheaters wound up. I’m sure some of the readers here can guess.
     .
     I saw the light, got back into the first university, worked a lot harder and finished well. Thank God it was not so expensive then and I had the time. Viet Nam hadn’t really fired up yet although I would have been drafted if I hadn’t been otherwise occupied.
     .
     If you’ve read this far, you probably should be doing something useful.

121. JD, Your note about the possibility of your son going into architecture appeared while I was writing mine. I was an architect. I need to marshal my thoughts on my experience that they might be succinct and not contaminate your thoughts on the subject. In short though, if I had it to do over it isn’t what I’d do. More to follow.

122. Hi JD, more on the imprudence of a career in architecture. I’ve read enough Dilbert to realize that many of my problems in my career were not peculiar to architecture, but …
     .
     Marketing guy agrees to a contract which cannot be performed profitably unless everyone works 60 hour weeks for 40 hour salaries. Hero also agrees to twice as many in-progress reviews as usual.
     .
     I worked in firms and mostly did industrial, military, and public works projects. I do have some office buildings in western Chicago suburbs of which I’m proud. I got out of school in 1968 with a BS and Masters. six years plus the seventh finding out that I didn’t want a degree from a third rate school.
     .
     Licensing today generally requires the professional degree which will take 5 or 6 years depending on how tightly they cram the 4 years of education into five or six years. Two more years of ‘apprenticeship” and what used to be a 5 day exam – don’t know now. I eventually was licensed in 14 states, actually did projects in all of them plus one in Ireland (this was the most fun.)

     Without a license you are not an Architect.

     Your son may not react as badly as I did to the suffocating increase in permitting requirements and their capricious and highly variable application art the hands of bureaucrats (very likely the same guys who cheated at Uni).

     I designed two plants for making concrete pipe. The one built in Dade county (Miami) took 9 months to permit. The one in Frederick MD took 3 weeks. go figure.

     Continuing education is another recent (well, starting in 1990) imposition. In order to maintain your license you get to sit in classes listening to someone who knows about 30% of what you know tell you how to do various aspects of the trade, deal with environmental regs etc.

     If your son becomes technically adept and is most interested in the work itself, he will likely rise to a management position where he will be on top of the pyramid beneath senior management (think marketing) and the highest level guy who actually knows what’s going on in the projects. This is the joint between the guys who know mother nature can’t be fooled and those who don’t.

     It may also be the joint between the personable people who cheated their way through school and those who did the problem sets themselves.

     I suspect that this sort of thing may occur in other professions. I’m sure that the rainmakers run most law offices and the scholars (if that’s the right term) are not held in particularly high regard.

     I used to think of the guys who figured out how to do the things marketing had promised to be the wizards. Last place I worked never promoted wizards, always hired bureaucrats for middle management which meant that if we had a serious technical challenge there was a good chance department head wouldn’t understand it.

     It may be that others here can give you a sunnier view of this. I was able to convince our daughter not to go into her mother’s and my profession.

     There’s a lot more, but I’ll spare the Lucia coterie unless someone asks.

123. Editing still doesn’t work. I used to be able to spell Chicago.
     I’m using Chrome 57.

124. j ferguson,
     WP recently auto-updated. The edit plugin may be incompatible now. For me, the best thing to do is wait– if it is incompatible, likely it will get updated.

125. j ferguson,

     Continuing education is another recent (well, starting in 1990) imposition. In order to maintain your license you get to sit in classes listening to someone who knows about 30% of what you know tell you how to do various aspects of the trade, deal with environmental regs etc.

     I think many people could give stories about the lack of wisdom of continuuing education requirements. These always sound much better on paper than they work out in the wild.

126. I should add that first place I worked after graduation, Consoer, Townsend & Assoc, where Lucia’s father in law also worked and with whom I did two projects was wonderful. The regulation mania hadn’t started yet, fees were sufficient to do the work and the intention of the partnership was to do everything as well as it possibly could be.

     At that point I’d never worked for a bad outfit and had no idea they existed. They do.

127. My brother was a chemistry major, and he also said Physical Chemistry was by far the most difficult class.

128. Tom Scharf,
     I found quantum chemistry more challenging, but yes, pchem, if rigorous, is difficult for many.

129. Tom,
     I might add that gradual level organic chemistry was just about the dumbest course I ever encountered…. memorize in detail some 200 complicated ‘named reactions’ (named after the chemists who invented them). Total waste of time.
     .
     j ferguson,
     The sales/marketing types do tend to end up running the show, at least at many US companies. Less common in Europe, and less common at smaller/start-up companies, where actually knowing the details matters.

130. There is more than a passing exposure to one of Parkinson’s observations in architecture; the one about an organization which is building a monument to itself is likely dying, witness Sears Tower.

     In school we were lectured by two guys who did custom houses in suburban St. Louis. Their advice was to get your fee in front. The reasoning, doubtless based on bitter experience, was that couples retired, discovered that they might not really like each other but didn’t want to separate, so they would obsess over grandchildren, take cruises, and when all that went stale would hit on designing their own house. The divorce would usually happen during construction.

     I should have added to my remarks about Consoer Townsend that when I worked there it was a partnership of 13 engineers each of whom could actually do the stuff, and sort of reveled in it. They enjoyed seeing clever solutions to the problems which came our way. Several of them were effective marketers or it wouldn’t have worked.

     This was in stark contrast to two of the outfits I worked for late in my career where the Powers That Be had no idea how close to impossible some of the projects had been, one of which involved building a Metro station on a curved section of track between two bridges and over a 130″ water main which turned out to be 2 feet higher than shown on the survey. Making the station fit and meeting the track geometry requirements ultimately required considerable computer modeling. The fit was within an inch or two of not working.

     I go to see it every once in a while. There is a sign crediting the politicians and contractors without any reference to the two guys who actually made it possible.

     Maybe it’s childish to get upset over this sort of thing but it was so frequent.

131. Karl (2015) has hit the news again since retired top NOAA administrator, John Bates, decided he could not keep silent anymore and has blown the whistle on Karl’s insulated and compartmentalized approach to data analysis and official changes that were in direct conflict with the best practices protocols set up under his own administration. You can see Bates’s blog post on judithcurry.com or read the article in the UK Daily Mail.
     .
     Zeke Hausfather and Peter Thorne are posting and tweeting down Bates but Sen Lamar Smith is re-opening his investigation into Karl (2015). Surprise. I just watched an interview Zeke did for the Huffington Post to explain the Karl (2015). I lost count on the deceptive omissions and gross exaggerations that Zeke never would have tried to pull off talking to us as an “honest broker.”
     .
     Kenneth Fritsch, Peter Thorne gives links in his post for Karl (2015) code and data are publicly available here. and technical bugs and fixes. I don’t know if Karl neglected to mentioned that to you in your correspondence with him. One of Thorne’s links was bad but he gave me a good one here this morning.
     .

132. Ron Graf,
     I can’t really get too worked up about Bates complaints of how Karl(15) failed to follow established procedures and ‘put his thumb on the scale’ at every opportunity. The UEA emails show the same behaviors have been common in climate science for decades (the Steig et al paper on phantasy warming in Antarctica is but another example of obvious bias), and Pielke Sr has been complaining about Karl’s blatant biases since Karl was a lead IPCC author. The bias is just politics masquerading as science… there is nothing really new or shocking in Bates’ complaints.
     .
     Political disagreements have only political solutions: broad and deep defunding of climate ‘science’ and increased funding of real data collection, especially aerosol effects, that can help define the actual sensitivity of Earth to GHG forcing.

133. Ron Graf (Comment #158738)

     The Bates criticism is wrong footed in my opinion and I have posted at Climate Etc. on my exchanges with Karl and his coauthors and Hausfather and what I see as the problems with their analyses or better what they have failed to analyze. I have shown my analysis of the Karl series in more detail than I did here at this blog but with very little feedback. I have continued to do empirical mode decomposition analysis – and at this point for my own edification.

     I am profoundly tired of the exchanges on this topic that get into personalities and offer very little in the way of concrete analyses. The one currently going on at Climate Etc is particularly tiresome.

134. I should have mentioned that I have all the Karl data and that was never the problem. The hang-up that ended our exchange was the failure of Karl and a coauthor to accept the separation of components of these temperature series that revealed a reoccurring cyclical component of 60-70 years that very dramatically changes the current view of the secular trend. I emailed my analysis results to Hausfather anf he did not reply.

135. SteveF (Comment #158614)

     I have a graduate degree in inorganic chemistry, but thought the graduate courses I took in organic chemistry were very good and much different than the approach you mentioned and that I was exposed to in undergraduate chemistry in those days. We worked with various types of reaction mechanisms that could be applied to particular reaction by knowing the expected type of reaction. There were as I recall SN1, SN2, E1 and E2 reactions with substitution nucleophilic (SN) and eliminate (E) designations.

     I do remember the Grignard reaction and reagent from my under graduate days and the importance of keeping the reaction materials dry. I wonder if they still use Grignard in chemistry classes today or teach SN and E reaction mechanisms.

136. Interesting interactions discussed here about marketing and engineering. I worked in engineering in administration and scientist capacities in a company where there was good daily communication with marketing, sales, engineering and manufacturing. A project sometimes started with a research idea or a marketing/sales need. Either way marketing would get involved and push really hard for a schedule to get the project into production so they could make a big sales splash. Management at the highest levels would get word from marketing that is urgent to get a new product out the door in order to get a leg up on competition. Engineering would be responsible for putting together a time table and that time table was never satisfactory for marketing and by then the highest levels of management. Management would twist arms in order to get the schedule pushed into the impossible zone and could sometimes get engineering management to agree. That not only created problems for engineering but also made manufacturing feel that they would be getting a process that was not ready for production and then they would be blamed for failures.

     It took me a while to figure out that, while some of this problem arose naturally from the different agendas of the various corporate functions, it was best handled at the personal level where sometimes most of the parties involved could at least begin to appreciate the problems that could be created for other functionaries.

137. Kenneth,
     All the reaction mechanisms you note (and a bunch of others) were covered in introductory organic chemistry. The graduate organic course I took was taught by a “pot-boiling-distilling-down-and-dirty” synthetic organic chemist. He was the type who worried about converting pine tar into birth contol pills via a simple 70 step reaction scheme. Complicated ‘named reactions’ appeared to be his life. There must be a place for memorizing hundreds of named reactions, it’s just noplace I would ever want to be.

138. “Karl (2015) has hit the news again since retired top NOAA administrator, John Bates, decided he could not keep silent anymore and has blown the whistle on Karl’s insulated and compartmentalized approach to data analysis and official changes that were in direct conflict with the best practices protocols set up under his own administration. You can see Bates’s blog post on judithcurry.com or read the article in the UK Daily Mail. ”

     Thats a gross mischaracterization of the whole affair.

     Most of you have not worked with CDRs or NOAA operational products.

     CDRs and the whole satellite data processing chain was Bates baby.

     Here is what Karl and Co did

     A) They took ERSST v4 AS IS from prior analysis. This is an operational product.
     B) They took a non operational version of the land data.

     They put them together and published.

     The changes in ERSST v4 are enough to weaken the pause. the land component doesnt change.

     Bates wanted the New series to be vetted as a Operational product. Peterson estimates that would take a year or two.

     So they published the results. They didnt create or archive the results as an Operational product. Instead they posted to the ftp
     Its been there all the time.

     There is no THUMB on the scale.

     A) we looked and could not find one.
     B) The extra warming comes from ERSST karl didnt do that work

     Now back to CDRs. As leif Svalgaard explains the CDR Bates loves as a great example… is garbage. Its been superceeded by better science. Maybe a couple years down the road you will see the better science show up in a CDR package.
     My observations: I started looking at CDRs a couple years back, primarily the UAH CDR and the RSS CDR.. They are pretty good documents of what was done years ago.

     The whole CDR process is geared toward big satellite data products. You have huge datasets. Long and tedious processing chains. You dont get new versions every month or year.. Sometimes you have to wait years for them to fix an error and they just expect you to use the junky data because it is well documented junk.

     Other funny thing.

     When Zeke Published his paper he was criticized by Anthony for not having the latest 2016 data. So On one hand you get criticized if you only use data that is fully vetting, and on the other hand you get criticized if you publish the latest and greatest.

139. Kenneth,
     The Dilbert cartoon I most sympathized with was Dilbert saying to the boss “Marketing told the client we could do what???”
     .
     I worked for a general contractor who used to say that the construction industry was led by its dumbest members, the theory being that they unwittingly underbid jobs, got them, and then devised some magical (innovative?) way to save the bacon.
     .
     Sticks and stones is a lot easier, I imagine, than pharmaceuticals.
     .
     For the most part, unanticipated construction design problems usually could be solved in days or weeks, seldom more than a month, unless of course they were discovered during construction with the meter running often at $thousands/hour, then faster. I still have nightmares about a couple of these, 15 years after leaving it all behind.

     Pharmaceutical business must be a lot tougher. How often to you commit big mucks to something you think you can figure out, but haven’t yet?

140. Damned non-editor. make that ‘big bucks’ not ‘big mucks’

141. SM: Thats a gross mischaracterization of the whole affair.
     .
     I assume you are referring to Bates, and not my synopsis of Bates.
     .
     “They took ERSST v4 AS IS from prior analysis. This is an operational product.”
     .
     The Daily Mail did mischaracterize or misunderstand some of Bates’ points (allegedly), but the DM said that Bates said ERSST4 is flawed (perhaps independently from Karl15) but not necessarily independent of Karl himself. The DM article also said that ERSST5 will be cooler than ERSST4 due to Karl et al biases being undone.
     .
     Steve, thanks for commenting. The Senate Committee on Science will be weighing in at some point as well.
     .
     My personal issue with K15 is that my reading of Matthews(2013) the engine room intake temperatures have less biases relative to buoys then canvass buckets. The EITs should be just about the same as buoys as the slight warming from ship residence time is offset by the depth of the intake, 3-30 meters. The canvass buckets, OTOH, cool by the minute from evaporation of the wet, uninsulated exterior. Though the sampling and reading stabilization time vary, along with outside air temp and wind speed, the error is almost always toward cooling. Thus the historic correction should be to warm the historic data due to past bucket, not cool it due to EITs. Matthews also pointed out the during WWII any bucket readings would have been switched from night-time to daylight since night war-time running was black-out conditions. Thus the warming bulge attributed to EIT increase could easily be warm daytime buckets. I don’t know if the meta-data is available to verify but it’s worth considering.

142. Here is Matthews(2013) part I and part II.

143. “The Daily Mail did mischaracterize or misunderstand some of Bates’ points (allegedly), but the DM said that Bates said ERSST4 is flawed (perhaps independently from Karl15) but not necessarily independent of Karl himself. The DM article also said that ERSST5 will be cooler than ERSST4 due to Karl et al biases being undone.”

     They are NOT Karl biases being undone.

     They will add in Argo Data.

     Bates had nothing of substance to say about ERSST v4. ZERO
     And karl had nothing to do with it. It was finished years ago.

144. The question of warming the past or cooling the present is a misdirection and Non issue.

     Typically you want to adjust the deep past. for a very simple reason

145. Steve Mosher,
     Want to bet on the impact of ARGO data on the SST trend? I am betting that more conplete data, including ARGO surface temperature readings, makes the “pausebuster” trend less of a pausebuster.

146. The bottom line is this: the Bates story is bad PR for Warmists. And judging by their behavior, bad PR must be combated at all costs.

     Wish they had the same attitude about bad science.

     Andrew

147. SM They are NOT Karl biases being undone.
     .
     Are you asserting that ERSST V4 was not under the influence of Karl, (not that but one or two of the NOAA staff, like Bates, is not feeling they are on a “higher mission”)? Who did Boyin Huang, the lead author of ERSST4, work for in 2013-2015?
     .
     They will add in Argo Data.
     I am missing your point. Are you saying ERSST4 lacked Argo data?
     .
     Bates had nothing of substance to say about ERSST v4. ZERO.
     .
     Bates said it was directed from the White House through Holdren, that Karl ignored his own department’s quality controls, that Karl was pushing warmer interpretations at every point a judgment had to be made. Are you saying there is no way to bias the adjustments? To me, reading that they “just learned” about the EIT bias and needed to correct it just as they are leaving the use of EIT, smacks of using authority to re-right history, in this case making it a cooler one.
     .
     Peter Thorne responded to me yesterday that Huang cited Matthews(2013) but I don’t see it in Huang et al part I or part 2. Steve, did you read Matthew? If so, what is your comment.

148. There is a big difference between the deviousness that is being aimed at Tom Karl and the indication that authors like Karl on all sides of the AGW issue in climate science tend to publish rather exclusively those analyses that agree with their prior view of the subject. This tendency is not limited to climate science but gets more attention in climate science because of the political implications.

     The use of 90% confidence intervals (CIs) and comparing the 1950-2014 period to the approximate 2000-2014 periods in Karl is an indication that the authors had a point to show in mind from the beginning and it was not a matter of showing evidence with several sensitivity tests using other CIs and time periods and letting the readers draw some conclusions about the certainty of the evidence. The justification the Karl authors used for the CIs and time periods was that the comparison was to made against what was reported by the IPCC. That in my mind does not show much independence on their part or a willingness to show sensitivity testing.

     Boyin Huang was the lead author for the paper describing and rationalizing the changes from ERSST v3b to v4 and not Karl. Karl was the messenger in this case and the paper he wrote should be judged based on how the paper he coauthored used that data and to lesser extent how in interpreted the changes. I think there are some real issues that need to be discussed with the Karl paper and the general issue of how to best analyze the observed global mean temperature series and for comparisons the CMIP5 model series. By implying deviousness to the work only sidetracks the discussion of the real issues of which there are many important ones.

     In my email exchanges with Tom Karl and some of his coauthors I certainly got the impression that they were interested in the data showing that the slowdown was not statistically significant, but were prepared to make some concessions about the methods to use. When we finally got into a discussion of Empirical Mode Decomposition for analyzing these temperature series I found that the Karl coauthors I talked to did not understand the proper use of the method by way of a full decomposition of the components and showing which components were statistically significant. The derived secular trend and the reoccurring 60-70 year cyclical statistically significant components would show no difference in trend between the older and newer versions of the GMST that Karl presented in his paper and would also show a secular trend with no significant differences in trend for shorter time periods within the longer 1900-2016 time period.

     Norden E. Huang invented and patented the EMD method. The irony of all this is that colleagues from NOAA (Tom Karl’s agency) worked with Huang when he was at NASA on applications of EMD type methods.

     http://www.pnas.org/content/104/38/14889.full.pdf

     http://patents.justia.com/inventor/norden-e-huang

     https://books.google.com/books?id=MPcRI3tRaYQC&pg=PT258&dq=norden+e+huang+at+NOAA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjakLK-sYPSAhUL-mMKHY_pBloQ6AEIJzAC#v=onepage&q=norden%20e%20huang%20at%20NOAA&f=false

     As I noted in my posts at Climate Etc an analysis of the ERSST v3b to v4 versions are best started by looking at the difference plots of the series and working backwards to determine how those differences can be explained and the looking at the differences between how Had CRUT and ERSST handle the adjustments for the the SST series.

     I have not had time to do a good analysis of these differences since getting into EMD and CEEMD analysis of the observed and modeled time global mean temperature series. There is a large difference around 1945 between v3b and v4 that I do not understand and then the steep trending difference at the latest decade or so of the difference series.

149. What QA is there that the adjustments of historic data is based on valid assumptions of the difference between legacy technology and current methods?

150. sorry for the grammatical error- the edit function does not seem to allow editing right now.
     The post should read: “What QA is there that the adjustment of historic data is based on valid assumptions/comparisons of the possible differences between legacy technology and current methods?

151. Kenneth, regarding “deviousness that is being aimed at Tom Karl,” I don’t believe either side see themselves as being anything but practical and acting on benevolent intention. However, there is a special obligation of those of scientific authority to take pains to be modest in claims, invite contrary explanations and abide by every protocol available to ensure quality. This goes double for those in charge of governmental agencies and labs. I hope you agree.
     .
     Hunter: “What QA is there that the adjustment of historic data is based on valid assumptions/comparisons of the possible differences between legacy technology and current methods?”
     .
     This is the master question. Kenneth is examining the statistical behavior and effect of the adjustments. I like many others feel that the documentation for the justification of the validation of the adjustments is lacking, especially looking at Matthews(2013) I and Matthews(2013) II. It says something that Peter Thorne was well aware of Matthews(2013) and thought Huang had cited it. It appears that either Thorne’s memory was faulty or that the citing got removed before final publication because I don’t see the citing.

152. Ron Graf, I have looked a comparison of 5 SST data sets with ERSST v4 for the period 1982-2016 by doing difference of v4 minus one of 5 data sets. There are differences for the earlier periods but I show this period because of the warming slowdown controversy.

     Obviously the ERSST v4 series is different from all other five and in much the same ways. From this one might conclude that v4 is wrong or that v4 is a recent improvement over the other 5 and those 5 are wrong or that all series do not exactly reflect the true SST temperature changes.

     Ron, I do not have time or interest at the moment to pursue these differences but I would suggest that if you are interested you might contact the scientists responsible for the other 4 non ERSST data sets and question them about these differences and whether they plan to acknowledge v4 as an improvement or show where it might be wrong or merely continue to use their data sets with these differences with v4.

     I would also look closely at the Huang paper describing the changes from v3b to v4 and determine where there might be questions that sensitivity tests might shed more light. The major changes were:

     1. For ERSST, in contrast to other SST analyses, ship SSTs are adjusted using Nighttime Marine Air Temperature (NMAT) data.

     2. Using the mean difference of ship-buoy data between 1990 and 2012 as 0.12°C with a STD of 0.04°C for adjustments.

     3. Some SSTs from NCEP GTS data and/or ICOADS R2.5 are not utilized for ERSST.v4 due to concerns about their quality, additional biases or uncertainties.

     4. In HadSST3, the bias adjustment is assessed based on a data deck dependence and measurement metadata where available, and the bucket corrections pre-1942 are based upon a physical model and climatological atmospheric conditions. In ERSST.v4, the bias adjustment is based on statistical fitting coefficient of Am,y and global climatological difference Cx,m of SST and NMAT, which does not explicitly involve individual SST metadata.

     5. There is also a weighting factor used in v4 for making the buoy measurements much more favored than the ship measurements.

     http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1600x1200q90/924/7SPI4V.png

     http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1

     After doing my analyses of the observed and RCP 4.5 GMST (where for the models I used the Land SAT and Ocean SST to obtain an apples to apples comparisons) series with Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD) I have lost some interest in looking at the observed temperature data set differences. These differences have little effect on the secular trends extracted with CEEMD. Further the trends between observed and modeled series are less significantly different and in both cases the trends are reduced from those determined by linear regression by nearly 50%. Most of this difference is due to the extraction of reoccurring cyclical trends from these series, but not all as some models do not have reoccurring cyclical componets. The cyclical components between the observed and modeled series can have very different frequencies.

     The reduction in the secular trend would have very dramatic effects on determination of ECS and TCR (reductions in value) for both the observed and modeled series. The coming together of secular trends for the modeled and observed series does not make, by itself, the model emulation of the observed series correct since other differences remain, such as: reoccurring cyclical components, red and white noise and warming rates between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

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