<p>^^^: marite
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<p>You can take the placement test without showing any evidence of taking the class at all.</p>
<p>So I don’t get the point of all your posts.</p>
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<p>That is the best thing to do. The teacher will have a sense of what is the best course for your son. By the way, several of my S’s friends are at MIT. They’re great kids, smart but not geniuses. What they had (which my S did not have) was a love of hands-on science.</p>
<p>POIH:</p>
<p>You’ve totally lost me with your talk of credit, and colleges demanding that students take Calculus or MV-Calc. You need to re-read your own posts as well as those of others!</p>
<p>Yes, you can take a placement test without showing any previous course taken. Does it mean you SHOULD NOT take the course? Unless a student can learn MV-Calc on his own, he’s better off taking a class with a teacher who will teach him the materials. This is what we’re talking about: what courses to take next year.</p>
<p>kayakmom:
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<p>Thanks for clearing this up. That was what I thought and so recomended tha the take AP Calc BC in 10th followed by AP Statistic in 11th (Which will reduce the course load in junior year).</p>
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<p>Again that is what I inferred and so recomended that he takes Multivariate Calculus/Differential Eq 12th grade. It will help him with his math classes at any college he decide to matriculate.</p>
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<p>I understood that OP child is NOT marite son or equivalent; so my advice was according to what the inference I could get about the applicant. I don’t think OP son is planning to take placement test to get into linear algebra or discrete math during freshman year.</p>
<p>kayakmom:
How many AP classes will your son be taking next year? And how many would he want to take in 11th and 12th grades?
Ordinarily, students take AP-Calc together with AP-Physics. A traditional science sequence would have bio, chem and physics, but there are many who advocate studying physics first. If your S were to take AP-Calc BC and AP-Physics next year, he could take AP-Chemistry in 11th grade and AP-Bio in 12th grade. My S claimed that having studied physics before made it easier for him to study chemistry. He did not care for Bio (although he did well on the AP exam) because it involved too much memorization.</p>
<p>POIH:</p>
<p>You gave thoughtful advice. It was your various statements about what colleges require and the whole issue of credits to which I objected.</p>
<p>marite:
he is taking AP computer science (required in his STEM teack)
AP US government
and then this AP calculus or AP stats class(es)
biology honors
spanish 3 honors
english honors
these are all year round courses</p>
<p>kayakmom:
He might then consider taking AP-Stats next year, together with AP-CS and AP-US government. Then in 11th grade, he could take AP-Calc BC and AP-Physics. Will he be taking APUSH and AP-Lit in 11th grade? That is a very frequent 11th grade combination. In that case, he might wait to take AP-Physics in 12th grade, though in general, it’s not a great idea to leave too much of a gap between classes in the same field.</p>
<p>OP, is there any sort of data about how well the BC Calc students do on the AP exam? I can tell you that UMD offers credit for a number of math courses via placement exam, so if your S chooses to take Lin Alg, MV, etc. in HS, there are opportunities to gain not just placement, but credit as well.</p>
<p>If he is taking Pre-Calc now, he may well want to consider taking the SAT-II Math Level II exam in May or June while the material is still fresh. (There is no calculus on the exam!)</p>
<p>For a kid who is doing well in Pre-Calc and enjoying it, I’d be inclined to head directly to BC, especially if he hates being bored.</p>
<p>My math major took the following track at his HS:
9th – Functions (combo of pre-calc, trig and some AB)
10th - Analysis I (BC Calc taught in one semester and then they keep going; 90%+ make 5s)
11th - MV/DiffEq, Discrete Math, AP Stat (calc-based, taught in one semester)
12th- LinAlg, Complex Analysis, proofs course, Mathematical Physics (pre-req MV/DiffEq)
Placed directly to Analysis in college.</p>
<p>My non-math/science major (a B+/A- math student):
10th – Pre-Calc
11th – Calc AB (though he now says he felt AB was slow)
12th – AP Stat (because his major will require several stats courses)</p>
<p>OP - I do not know how many classes your kid is allowed to take, but is there any way he could double up on science? You indicated that he is science oriented and you would like that.
If he is so involved with science projects as a freshman, there is a big possibility that he will be much more involved in a near future.
I know that on this board we frequently loose perspective, but one should rememeber that Calculus is after all a college course ;)</p>
<p>I was a freakin’ math major and I find all this taking-of-calculus-at-early-ages to be incredibly excessive and over the top. Unless the child is a true mathematical genius – oh good lord, give it all a rest. It’s not a race to amass higher math courses. Take a nice walk or something.</p>
<p>in this school it is not amassing random math credits but the program requires math every year for 4 years…</p>
<p>Yup. That’s why my S took so many college math courses. He was not allowed to have study hall, let alone “take a nice walk or something.”</p>
<p>S did take a long walk…and sat under a tree in the front yard with the dog…and wound up with his Intel project. Every math class after BC Calc was an elective and he was darned glad to have the chance to take them at HS with his friends instead of schlepping to the college down the road. </p>
<p>There are plenty of pathways for high school kids who like math and are good at it. Mine was never particularly fond of ARML, Mandelbrot, Putnam and the math team, so he avoided them. Bringing in Physics, CS or engineering classes/robotics/FIRST are good ways to help a mathy kid branch out. So is building stuff in the garage.</p>
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<p>POIH doesn’t need to read more carefully, despite your gracious insistence. His comments were entirely correct: at MIT, the large majority of students who take advanced subjects in high school are required to re-take them in college. Only a few of those ostensibly qualified students pass the advanced standing exams. The rest face General Institute Requirements in multivariable calculus, electromagnetism and other courses that they took prior to MIT.</p>
<p>If they took Multivariable Calculus in the Harvard Extension School (or now, in the College, as I believe it is now possible) must they re-take it?
I do realize that math classes vary enormously in quality from college to college. I was careful to say the "self-same"courses. My S did not attend MIT, but Harvard certainly did not insist that he re-take courses he had taken or audited at Harvard.</p>
<p><a href=“marite:”>quote</a> </p>
<p>I was careful to say the “self-same” courses.
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<p>The dispute preceded the use of the words “self-same”, and consists in you most uncarefully asserting that POIH needs a reading lesson (for confusing credit and placement) when in fact, he correctly understood that there is no functional difference between the two where the courses are an enforced requirement.</p>
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<p>The question was clearly about colleges in general:</p>
<p>“Can you tell me which college demands that someone who has taken MV-Calc in college retake it?” (marite, post #34)</p>
<p>That was in direct response to the preceding post (#33) where POIH wrote: “we are not talking about your son”. Indeed, you elaborated: </p>
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<p>Taking the class at Harvard Extension (which is how nearly all the local high school students would “take it at Harvard”) has no bearing on exemption from MIT’s 18.02 first-year requirement, unless MIT deems such Extension classes worthy of transfer credit. Harvard College itself does not give credit for the Harvard Extension School classes, and MIT’s multivariable calculus class is more rigorous than any of the Harvard equivalents, so transfer is hardly a given. That is also true for differential equations and linear algebra. </p>
<p>We can see from all this that not only did POIH not “need to read more carefully”, but the idea that the discussion was about buried subtleties in the words *self-same classes<a href=“i.e.,%20high%20school%20students%20taking%20classes%20at%20the%20same%20college%20where%20they%20later%20matriculate”>/i</a> is a new and unintended reading raised after it became clear that POIH was right.</p>
<p>Not sure if this matters, but MIT did give me transfer credit for multivariable calculus I took at Ohio State, and I know others who were able to get transfer credit for differential equations and linear algebra, and there must be a way to get transfer credit for even more advanced classes, since there are instructions on what to do in this case.</p>
<p>But anyways, I think something you should consider is how the different sequences affect your son’s mathematical abilities. If he takes Calculus BC next year, will there be any way for him to continue on with some sort of math (probably not AP Statistics since the math needed isn’t very much) his junior and senior years? People already complain about how students forget things over a summer, so no math for a year or two could be detrimental, and it might be better to just do Calculus AB one year and BC the next. On the other hand, if there are possibilities for further math junior and senior years, then the slower pace of Calculus AB one year and BC the next might hurt a little.</p>
<p>Siserune:</p>
<p>Like POIH, you confuse credit and placement.</p>
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<p>My S did not get any CREDIT for the classes he took at Harvard, starting with MV-Calc and LA. We knew the policy, and credit was of no interest to us. S learning math at an appropriate level was.
He did get PLACED into more advanced math classes.
A friend of his audited Math 25 as a high school senior. He was not asked to repeat Math 25 or go into Math 55. He did not get credit for any of the courses he had taken at Harvard before, but he certainly got placed into courses based on his record. He began taking graduate classes as a freshman.</p>