Sir, Ben Topley is to be congratulated for his enthusiasm in producing the Soapbox article in the March edition, ‘Geology – poor relation?’, but I can’t say that I agree with his call for the upgrading of status of A-Level geology.
The main problem is that many schools and colleges do not offer A-Level geology, so all university courses have to start at the beginning, making the A-level , if not a waste of time, a time that could be better spent. When I started my geology degree in 1971, I was a mature student with a maths degree and an A-Level in geology, which I acquired while working. At the beginning of the course, those of us with the A-Level were told by one of the lecturers, ‘We shall soon catch you up’, which proved to be only too true.
I left the university with a BSc and a (hard rock) PhD and entered the world of hydrogeology, a subject about which I knew very little. What clinched the job were the maths and computing experience that I had and prospective employers, in general, were more interested in the maths than the geology. In employment, my mathematical background enabled me to reach the technical level of my new colleagues without too much trouble.
When the water authority, where I worked, was privatised (1989), I moved to a polytechnic, soon to be transformed to a university, where I began teaching undergraduates. One of the subjects I taught, not surprisingly, was hydrogeology. In the course, there was a little bit of maths, a little bit of physics, and a little bit of chemistry. Students who had no better scientific background than geology and/or geography always found the course a struggle and I often received complaints that the course was too ‘mathematical’, when the truth was that the level was no higher than the old O-level. Most of my colleagues made the same observation. We found that students with only a C-grade GCSE maths qualification, now the minimum for university entrance, often had little experience of algebra or trigonometry and knew nothing about interpreting straight line graphs. It’s difficult to make much progress in science without these elementary skills.
I retired 10 years ago and one of the great sorrows of my career is the way that the subject has been dumbed down to allow students with a poor background in science an easier life. Some students found that their A-Level notes were adequate for their first-year university exams, which shows the level to which they have been reduced. In my A-Level, there was an element of crystallography. I was presented with crystals and asked to identify the Miller indices of the faces. Now, as far as I am aware, there is no crystallography in modern A-Levels and it’s not even included in many modern degree courses, and that includes the one to which I used to contribute.
When It comes down to it, there is no science without maths, physics, and chemistry, and maths is always going to be the most important. It may be an obsession to concentrate on these subjects, but it’s bang up to date. It’s probably too late for Ben but there is no better way to enter the study of geology than with a solid background of basic science.