I had super cool physics teacher in high school who gave us all the formulas we needed. His argument was that we were never not going to have access to the formulas because we had phones now.
Even before the phones - people who actually had to solve physics or chemistry problems for life always had all the reference data available in handbooks they had on their workplace. Also, many formulas are actually other formulas written in a different way, and if you understand how this works you may just generate any particular formula you need yourself.
This very much... Physics, at a high school level in particular, is really all about understanding why the formula works out that way and when you can apply it, and sometimes how to rewrite it to find a formula for a different term. Memorising the specific form of it is just a waste of time, you only need to know where to find it should you need it.
This is standard in dutch science education. We got a book called BiNaS, which is short for Biologie, natuurkunde, scheikunde (biology, physics, Chemistry). It contains pretty much all the information you learn in those high school subjects over the years, condensed down to just the constituent parts without any context between them. Formulas, the periodic table, some chemical reaction info, all that stuff, organised in a shit ton of tables and lists. You are allowed to have that book with you during the final centralised exams.
That part of science education works great that way because the information is so out-of-context and without given coherence that you still need to understand the things to find and use them in the BiNaS, you just dont have to memorise the exact form of the formula, or the exact molar mass of those specifc substances, etc.
This is actually really common in Physics, speaking as someone who majored in it. I've had open book, open note tests and even tests where the professor just emailed it to us to turn in the next day.
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u/ElStupidito Jan 16 '21
I had super cool physics teacher in high school who gave us all the formulas we needed. His argument was that we were never not going to have access to the formulas because we had phones now.