In the summer of 1976 school pupils studying physics at A-level in Northern Ireland opened their second exam paper to find a question that started: “A passenger is standing at point P in a ship which is in a rough sea. The point P is rising and falling with a frequency of 1 cycle in 2π seconds, through a total vertical distance of 2m between the highest and lowest points of the motion. Assuming that the motion of the ship….”
Such physics-based excitement was not restricted to Northern Ireland. Five years later pupils studying the Oxford and Cambridge syllabus were welcomed with the following: The table shows typical working stresses and strains in five different materials...Which material is stiffest?” There was not a single question in either paper that could not have been asked – and answered – more than 50 years previously.
Contrast these questions with the “advance notice” material sent to pupils studying the OCR Advancing Physics course last year. The students receive these documents a few weeks before the exam and then have to answer questions related to it.
Last year’s advance material was actually a 2000-word article about the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and X-ray astronomy. Moreover, it included information about a balloon-based CMB experiment called BOOMERANG, which released its first results as recently as 2001, and the Chandra X-ray Telescope, which was launched in 1999. The questions in the exam paper itself were a mixture of modern cosmology, such as calculating Hubble’s constant from a graph of recent data, and more traditional fare about the various forces acting on the balloon.
In the January issue of Physics World Peter Rodgers, editor of Physics World describes how physics A-Levels have been brought up to date.