Amherst had this requirement until a student tragically drowned during the test in 1973.
The history of the swim test is interesting. It is a legacy practice from the early 1900s when student bodies were mostly male and there was a concern that “our young men” needed to be fit for war.
Sure - but that info isn’t widely publicized nor should it be expected. Not all kids (even those who are good students) can learn a whole course virtually over 8 weeks in the summer. Nor can AP classes really be taken easily in that model.
I have one theater kid who does set crew. She builds and hauls stuff up and down for hours each day. Definitely a workout!
And MIT. And Columbia (but not engineering). Additionally, they all have, including Columbia engineering, a PE requirement to graduate.
Engineers don’t need to swim? Do you know why the distinction?
The joke is because engineers can build a boat or bridge to get off the island.
The reality is that years ago there was a proposal to eliminate the swimming requirement. The faculty of the engineering school approved it; the faculty of Columbia College voted to keep it.
Weird that they kept the PE requirement for all but eliminated the swim test.
I knew how to swim, so I took bowling and ballroom dancing 
Bowling was in the evening and involved having a beer and watching Monday Night Football.
How long should a school day be?
My D’s school day goes from 7:26 to 4:37. (From zero period orchestra to the end of 7th period chem lab.) Lunchtime is for club meetings and going to teacher office hours. Then she has stuff after school every day and on Saturdays. Of course, I only know about our kids’ HS, so I have nothing to compare.
I’m actually kinda a fan of mandatory PE requirements that have morphed more into mandatory social fun requirements.
Effectively, she has an 8-period + lunch hour school day in 9 hours. Probably a 6-period + lunch hour school day would be 7 hours if it gave similar time per class period.
My son was required to take PE even though he was a varsity distance runner all 12 seasons of track and cross country. One day he was required to run a mile for a grade in PE, the same day as a big cross country meet. He asked if he could do it another day and the teacher said no. I was ripped.
But he enjoyed absolutely destroying the football players in the class - he was small for his age when he was an underclassman.
Mount Holyoke has a PE requirement (four semesters, IIRC). Williams still has a PE requirement but dropped its swim requirement for equity reasons (swimming expertise skews white and wealthy).
Yes, this is the case for kids who do not take an elective in zero or 7th period, and who do not take a science with a required lab. The 6 period school day goes from 8:30 to 3:33.
Since our HS is the only public HS in our city, it serves a very wide spectrum of kids. They don’t all choose to spend 9 hours at school.
Could he have used his cross country time, divided by the number of miles in the course he ran?
We don’t even have a pool here, I don’t think they are that common in NJ, but we have a lot of beaches and drownings every summer (lots of lifeguards but many will swim when they’re off duty).
I took bowling one and two in college (and I cheated on the exams, I never learned how to keep score). We called our “teacher” belly button man, it was always on full display.
You would think so. Nope. It was ridiculous. His mile record time was 4:26.
For competitive college prep kids, I feel like if a school offered 12 courses at a time, even if 6 were optional, pretty soon kids would wonder how they could do it with less.
We have 8 in our district and my son felt like it wasn’t enough and was always working angles to skip courses to get to the ones he wanted. Everyone on the prep path used 5 for the core class, plus state mandated PE and two electives but all arts ECs had to be taken as a class to participate so that usually used up one slot, leaving only 1 elective to cover a wide range of college prep options like the AP econs, comp sci courses, AP research, an extra science or social science AP, etc. And if you wanted to do band and choir or band choir and drama at the same time, good luck. And if you were lucky enough to be one of the couple dozen offered the DE program at the neighboring university, you had to drop two HS courses to take it one there, further complicating the course calculations.
So perhaps fewer periods is a blessing if colleges can see that’s all that was offered and evaluate accordingly.
This seems like a long day! Then I was thinking about my D’s and it is pretty long too. Zero period starts around 6:40 am and then school is out at 3:25 pm. Sports practice after that until around 5:30 or 6.
This is 9 periods with zero. Zero period every day but the rest are split between A and B days.