General Question

talljasperman's avatar

Why is high school Biology not recognized in university and college?

Asked by talljasperman (21916points) May 19th, 2015

In NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Techology ) and UofA you can’t use Biology and Science to get into a trade or professional degrees without chemistry and physics.

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8 Answers

Tropical_Willie's avatar

Guess on my part – - Chemistry and Physics are mathematics based.

stanleybmanly's avatar

I don’t understand your statement. Are you saying that high school biology credits are worthless in matters of admission to university? Or is it that high school chemistry and physics credits are required to pursue degrees in the sciences? It isn’t unusual for good technical schools to require chemistry and physics credits for admission.

Mariah's avatar

What trades? Physics is highly important to certain trades (most forms of engineering) that biology is completely irrelevant to.

stanleybmanly's avatar

In fact it is one sign of a superior school that you are required to have some knowledge of the 2 disciplines. After all, if you can’t pass a high school chemistry or physics class, there’s little point to chasing a career in engineering.

jerv's avatar

Sciences are not interchangeable. Tell me, what part of biology taught you about Newton’s Laws of Motion? How does knowing one internal organ of a frog from another help you figure out why putting an aluminum cylinder head on an iron engine block without a head gasket causes issues beyond loss of compression? (Hint; the word “galvanic” is in there.) Neither regular science nor biology teach you enough about those things to count for jack, at least not as far as any sort of technical engineering goes.

Between biology, chemistry, and physics, there is only one that you can do without and still pursue any sort of technical degree; biology. It’s the least useful of the three unless you are going into the medical field. How useful chemistry is depends on what field you go into, but you need at least a better understanding of chemistry than a general high school science class teaches.

But there is no getting around physics. Without physics, you can forget about nearly every form of engineering in existence. Want to deal with computers? You must understand electricity, including electromagnetism. That means physics. Oh, and electricity is electron flow, so you have to know at least the basics of atomic structure from chemistry.

Also, what were your grades? If your GPA in high school was too low, they won’t count as fulfilling the requirements of higher-level classes anyways. Usually 2.0 or C is the minimum; a C-minus or lower may get you a high school diploma, but probably won’t get you into a college-level class.

Dutchess_III's avatar

If I understand, I think he’s asking why you have to take college level courses to get a job in certain fields, and that answers the question. College level courses are more advanced than high school courses.

jerv's avatar

@Dutchess_III Maybe. I took it as wondering why his high school biology didn’t satisfy the academic requirements for NAIT courses/programs. Many courses there list Physics 20 or Chemistry 20 as a prerequisite.

Now, there are some people that can get those requirements waived. For instance, the Navy taught me enough math, physics and such that I could skip over at least the 100-level courses, or shave a year off of my apprenticeship if I went to become a certified electrician.

But I doubt OP has credentials that would allow that; most civilians don’t get much (if any) certifiable non-college education. In fact, it sounds like OP falls short of the requirements for even the prerequisite courses.

There is a slim chance he could take a placement exam to get out of Science 10 so that he could take Physics 20 right off and be allowed into his desired courses after only one semester of classes, but I doubt it as Science 10 probably is a little more advanced than high school science. I’m thinking it more likely that he’ll have to spend a year (two semesters) taking care of low-level prerequisite courses before finally getting to the program he wants in his second year… assuming that he has the patience to wait that long and the grades to pass the Science 10 and Physics/Chemistry 20 classes the first time around.

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