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> As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores.

That's pretty counter-intuitive. Can you give a source?

Anecdote inbound. I recall our formal lab write-ups comprised a large part of our final grades. Poorly written, poorly formatted formal lab write-ups consistently got C's while well written and formatted write-ups got A's. In this case I can see a strong correlation between English scores and physics scores.

It's been twenty years since I saw that... google doesn't offer anything useful.

I am also skeptical. Quoting from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/02.23/05-ap.html :

> The study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia (UVA) found the best predictors of success in college science courses to be high school classes that foster mathematical fluency, value depth over breadth, and feature certain types of laboratory work.

The study appears to be https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/ficss/research/articles/Scie... . Table 4, model D, page 14 shows that science grades, followed closely by math grades, are much better than the English grade at predicting "College Science Grade". (It does not specifically pull out physics.)

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