I remember Anatomy & Physiology was the big weed-out class at East Carolina University at the turn of the millennium. There was a big nursing school there and a lot of people came there specifically for nursing so it was necessary to clear out the ones who wouldn’t make it. I was an English major, but I had friends who took it. You could tell who was in that class at the end of the semester by the haunted looks and the dark rings under their eyes from studying all night.
Did they also take their animal dissection specimens home with them?
Thankfully, I never had to dissect cats, but I heard about some A&P students who did, and they were bringing them back to the dorm to review the anatomy.
Remember that in the US at least, nobody actually majors in “physician training” or “medical research” as an undergrad. You’re doing a major in some specific academic field, most often something like biology or neuroscience etc., and understanding the fundamentals of those subjects requires calculus.
Yes, more knowledge of statistics would be good for med students too. Again, though, really understanding how statistics works uses some calculus. If we just want to train doctors to punch numbers into a stats analysis program, of course, less math understanding is needed.
There’s been talk for years of requiring stats instead of calculus for pre med students. Maybe that even happened. But it’s not crazy for medical students to understand organic chemistry and basic physics. And if understanding organic chemistry requires some math, then maybe it’s good for doctors to be good at math.
While it’s not a formal major, “pre-med” is a long-recognized course of study.
As a biology major, I can’t recall any information or concepts, the mastery of which required knowledge of calculus. The same goes for active medical practice, including the ability to evaluate published research.
Fossilized academic mandates are hard to eradicate despite their lack of utility.
Usually, “pre-med” means that you’re planning to follow an undergraduate degree program that will satisfy the undergrad education requirements for entry into a medical degree program. But that still involves having an undergrad major whose degree requirements are designed not exclusively for med students. There may exist some specialized pre-med undergrad degree programs somewhere in which students study literally only the subjects that they will directly use in medical school, but that’s not how “pre-med” usually works.
Sounds like you didn’t study quantitative models of cell motion, uncertainty estimation, kinematics of chemical reactions, etc. Which is fine, but a lot of biologists do study those things.
Basically, ISTM, all scientists who deal with quantitative modeling should have some knowledge of calculus at least by the college degree level. Most doctors don’t use calculus in the course of their work, of course, because most doctors aren’t scientists.
That’s potentially a valid argument for providing pre-med students with a more utilitarian and less mathy alternative to undergrad science degree programs. But I don’t think it’s a good argument for removing calculus requirements from the science degree programs themselves.
Since universities are businesses and flunking everyone leads to unhappy students, this has never been a thing, exactly.
What was (and perhaps still is) a thing was (is?) weeder courses with high standards and hard exams in science and engineering courses. When I did an engineering physics degree, one-third of the class failed “Mechanics 1”, a tough introductory course which foreshadowed four years of engineering, featured ample polar and spherical coordinates, Euler-Lagrange and Laplace and other transformations, and calculus of variations. One was expected to solve complex problems (each generally combining three hard problems one had at least seen before) from first principles. Exams were three questions, three hours, full marks given for reducing it to seven equations in seven unknowns. The actual exam answers provided by the professor when marks were listed literally filled two large walls with over eighty pieces of foolscap completely covered in math.
Out of three hundred students, two people got an A (85% or more; the highest mark), four people got an A- (80-84%). I did okay. I sometimes wonder if similar courses still exist - they say 70% of Harvard students have an A average.
For private institutions, this may well be the case, but when I was an undergrad at a public university, one of my friends who was a couple of years ahead of me told me: “This school doesn’t give a shit about you as an individual. If you flunk out, there’s three more applicants who are probably as good as you that are ready to take your spot. Do NOT take this place for granted.”
Looking at biology major course requirements among different universities, i see that while some require a year of calculus, others require either coursework in calculus or equivalent number of credits in data science/statistics.
As I recall, I did a year of calculus and a semester-long intro to statistics course in college. I would’ve been better off with more emphasis on statistics.
Context:
I studied business in a country where University was free … GREATTT, you might think - that’s the way it should be, right?
… yes … BUT!!!
- a (of course) state university designed and resourced for 8.000 students with 23.000 people studying there, b/c there were neither a financial nor an academic (numerus clausus) threshold to get into U.
- there was a class, everybody had to take (mandatory for all 4 studies there) - Informatics for Business
- the classroom where this course was read had exactly 91 seats, as this was the max. “fire-police” would allow for safety concerns.
- more than 1.000 students signed up for the class
- hence there was an entry exam, where the highest 91 scores would get admitted. So, by design, more than 900 people / 95+% had to fail this exam. This was about 1988 or 89 and the “answering sheet” was a lottery slip, as the state lottery was the organization able to grade the test in time (the beginning of the semester!) by “electrónic infrastructure”
- this was the modus operandi for the first 2 or 3 years - and the red-thread through Uni to weed out the “less committed coleagues” … huge nuisance for all “building” courses, like Math1/2/3 … b/c it could literally take you years to end this circle
- I graduated this 4 year degree after 7 years and was one of the faster ones … (pretty much every student is also working while studying)
- ahhhh … the pleasures of free access to education …
Calculus 2 is significantly harder than Calculus 1.
what?
(this phrase in its universality is just wrong)
I just remembered another pharmacy class that a lot of people really struggled with: Pharmacy Math. The first half of the semester was unit conversions, things like scruples and drams (REALLY, in 1991!) which people generally breezed through, and then the second half was statistics, which people often did not breeze through. They were things like p< whatever, chi-square, etc. and people who’d even taken introductory business classes, never mind actual statistics, did well, and the rest of us did not, because it did not cover basic things that were needed for a foundation into this. (No, Intro to Business wasn’t required at this college; some others did, even then.)
Universities are often public institutions that think they are businesses. Maybe I was glib, but denying there is a very significant business aspect to big education is silly. Before Trump, university education was one of America’s highest dollar, and most important and influential exports (and might still be).
Universities often do not care about individuals as such. But they care greatly about reputation, parental and alumni donations, the general success of graduates, etc. and their administration incorporates some business principles like rating professors, customer satisfaction, fundraising etc. - and this is becoming more so. Sorry, does Harvard give 70% of students an A since their standards are impossibly high?
Regularly failing a majority of students in a class, just because, does little to prepare students for future work or make them happy future donors. What purpose does this actually serve? There are universities that admit anyone, but have high standards and flunk plenty of people. This is not the norm in Canada or many places though.
I think that depends very much on the country and the funding model. Countries where it’s entirely government funded and universally available may operate on a very different system, which is what I assume Al128 is referring to; this can lead to situations which would make no sense at all in a business context.
My aforementioned Uruguayan friend, who went through a system where it was fully goverment funded and easy to access, with classes intended to reduce numbers, told me multiple similarly ridiculous stories and arbitary decisions.
Like… one year a bunch of protesting students blocked access to the exam hall for exam week, so no one could get in to sit their exams. Instead of simply changing the exams to a different time or new venue, every student who was supposed to be sitting an exam was failed and had to redo the class.That would be a crazy decision, incredibly inefficient, in a business; every cost entailed in the course to that point would need repeating, for students who, in many cases, already know the material. They’re preventing many of the following cohort from progressing, as they weren’t running extra classes and there’s only so many students they have facilities to take. Some good students may simply quit, as this adds a whole year to their degree and life moves on.
All this instead of the trivial admin cost of changing an exam time.
It would be a no-brainer decision in a system where the funding comes from individuals. But it’s fully government funded. They don’t need to worry about student fees, or alumni donations, or satisfaction surveys (especially in a small country where there may only be one university offering some subjects)- the only customer they need to worry about is the government, who don’t care at all about individual students or even classes, so long as they run the course and there are students on it. So long as it’s not actually impossible to pass, they’ll still get students enrolling; if it’s merely very very difficult, then there’s some real prestige attatched to succeeding. That university could make a political decision to allow the protests to seriously inconvenience other students, rather than the sensible business one of minimising the impact.
Fair enough. But it is reasonable for people to think about things in terms of their personal lived experience.