@telescoper This is a serious problem for leaving cert physics also and I suspect the issues are similar. But I don't know you can necessarily blame A-level/Leaving Cert Physics as the issue is getting them in the door to choose the subject in the first place. I think the problem stems from the junior cycle and perhaps will be exacerbated by the new JC Science. I am not sure it is necessarily clear to students what physics is at this stage and the stuff that clearly identifies as physics may be too closely related to engineering which has a similar (perhaps worse) issue of imbalance. Some of the interesting stuff like how metabolism works (fundamentally physics , isn't everything? ;-P ), can be too easily spun as simply biology or chemistry and physics loses out in any way as contributing. In Ireland, the vast majority of science teachers have biology backgrounds and not physics. This situation is likely to degrade further as the Teaching Council is not accrediting junior cycle science and so will not require science teachers to have ANY physics-specific credits in their third-level education. So a teacher specialising in biology and chemistry could teach science at JC including all the physics-related material. The situation is already bad where there is a severe lack of physics specialists teaching JC science but at least teachers typically had some physics in their background. I can't see how things get better with these constraints.