Unbiased questions about college admissions expectations

I received the packet for the upcoming CIC meeting, which included your letter summarizing your conversations with university personnel regarding the proposed changes in our science curriculum. Let me first say, this is an admirable step. Since a very significant percent of our students go on to college, university perceptions of the effectiveness of our curriculum is important.

Since you did not include the contacts' last names, titles or phone numbers for us to follow-up, I request that you contact them again, before our CIC meeting, to ask a few more questions.

First, following your theoretical line of questions, ask them:

"In our current curriculum, students can take three full years of biology, physics and chemistry, plus IB students take a fourth year of one of those sciences depending on their interest. In the proposed curriculum, an IB student would have one semester each of biology, chemistry, physics and earth science, plus two years of one of either biology, physics or chemistry. Which do you think is better preparation for the student?"

To be fair though, it is not likely that any of these people will unequivocally state that our proposed program is better than the current program since they have seen no actual student results. I think a better line of questions for university personnel would be along a factual, rather than theoretical, line. Please ask them these questions:

"Have you detected any weaknesses in Portage students in your university in regard to their science preparation? What are those weaknesses and how were they detected?"

"Do you have any reason to believe that a weakness in science preparation as prevented any Portage student from admittance to your university?"

"Are you aware of any high schools with an exceptionally strong science curriculum that you might recommend we look at to determine how to improve ours?"

Your suggestion that the new curriculum would be more challenging to honors students than the current program is interesting. I think most people would agree that more challenging is better, so any means we use to increase the challenge level to our students is good.

I have two questions for you:

Since all three schools referred to standardized test scores, like the SAT and ACT, as important admissions criteria for our students, what evidence do you have that shows that our students will perform as well as or better than they do under the current curriculum design?

What evidence do you have to indicate that students who have not performed well on the ACT, SAT and MEAP tests in science will do better under the new course design?

If you do not have time to make these phone calls before our meeting, I would be glad to make them. Just send me the names, numbers and job titles. This is an important decision affecting ALL our students.

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