I just read a few of the posts suggesting that potential McIntire students avoid taking Statistics and Micro in the same semester. My son’s AP scores appear to have freed him from taking Micro and Macro, but are there other McIntire prerequisites that older and wiser students would advise First Years to avoid taking together in the same semester? Also, my son earned a 5 on his AP Calculus exam, which gives him credit for Calculus 1310. However, I understand that McIntire prefers that a student’s Calculus course be UVA-taught. Is this correct? Thanks!!
Good questions. My son also had 5’s on AP micro, macro, calculus, history. His strategy is to get credit for history, test out of the foreign language requirement, to take calculus at UVA and is now considering taking the intermediate micro or macro courses or to take introductory micro and macro. So, I don’t know the answer to your question, however, I wold be interested as well.
Other posts have advised taking the AP credits for micro and macro since they tend to be large, “weed-out” classes. And my son did manage to test out of the language requirement (French) and several other requirements as well, so he does have a fair amount of room to experiment… Good luck to your son as well! Hopefully, someone can weigh in on the calculus question. Since my son doesn’t live for math, he’d be happy to take the Calculus course suffient for admission and focus more on econ, English, government, commerce, etc.
I had this exact same problem (I’m probably the poster from the other thread, so I can add to those comments). I had AP credit for AP Stats, Macro, Micro, AB+BC, and I placed into 2020 level of a language. I went to walk in advising for the comm school and talked with one of the assistant deans of admission for McIntire. Since there is a lot of misinformation that gets spread, I’ll try to post just what they told me.
Regarding calculus, some of the classes in McIntire do use basic calculus–particularly finance, for which they recommend taking an additional higher level math course. If the score was a 4 and not a 5 the committee might worry about calc ability, but I told the dean I got a 5 on both AB and BC and they said I was fine. They did say that they prefer seeing some math/quantitative courses taken at UVA, but that it doesn’t have to be calculus; they are looking for quantitative ability, not necessarily calculus ability. They even mentioned they consider some philosophy (i.e. symbolic logic), sociology, and psychology courses to be quantitative. They have more info about this topic on their admissions blog: http://mcintireblogs.org/keepingup/2016/07/19/what-calculus-course-should-i-take/
Regarding credit for several classes: the admissions committee said this happens fairly frequently. Some students use this credit to only take really easy courses to pad their GPA, and the dean said it’s really easy to tell when this happens. Several students get rejected every year with a 3.8+, and it was my impression from my meeting that those tend to be ones who test out of prereqs and then only take easy courses. The dean specifically said NOT to give up my AP credit (that advice might have been different for calc if I was weaker, but idk), but there were two alternate routes I could go instead. The first was to take more advanced courses–the exact example the dean used was intermediate micro rather than intro micro @asij2018 --and she even explicitly said that the committee might look on, say, a B+ as comparable to an A- in intro. The alternate route was to use your credits to explore something else you are interested in, particularly a second major. The dean kind of pushed the latter route too, so they don’t look down on it: I asked if I should retake some of the prereqs or take a higher level course, then she advised taking the higher level course, “or if you are interested in another major…” Another major would make it easier to disguise courses with high average GPAs too (they seem to think the number correlates with difficulty more than is true).
Overall, calc is probably the worst prerequisite grade wise. Not only does it have the worst average GPA, it is taught in small courses by grad students, not large lectures by profs, so the chance you end up with a grad student who screws you by giving out way worse grades than other sections is much greater, too. I know a couple people who had this happen to them.