Thank you all so much. It is so nice to be able to get such helpful advice. DC has warmed up to the idea of taking AP Calc. So we are set.
Do not think of nursing as a plan B for medical school. The two are different professions. Nursing school (as part of a U) admissions are competitive and the decision needs to be made early on in one’s college career- not after not getting into a medical school. Students need to show an interest in nursing, not be planning it as a fallback career. Your D should look at references for the many health care options to be knowledgeable about her options before starting college. There may be intriguing fields she never heard of.
Agree with taking AP Calc – but I disagree that you should necessarily repeat Calc in college. My D took Calc BC as a junior (4 on the exam) in HS and then took finite math her senior year. Got back on Calc train in college. Thought about ‘repeating’ Calc 2 b/c it’d been a while and she wasn’t highly confident, but her advisor said it was a harder class b/c it’s more designed to ‘sift through’ potential math and science majors. So she went ahead and took Calc 3 as a first year freshmen and did well – it was a small class with a collaborative environment. She worked hard and went to office hours a lot, but it paid off with an A- in the class and a boost in confidence. She’s now thinking of minoring in math.
Point being: see how it plays out in college and ask around if there are some levels of Calc that are tougher than others b/c they are gatekeeper classes. Don’t presume repeating a semester is always a good idea.
@mathmom. Your mathy and nonmathy kids had a mom named Math! (-
That’s an advantage. My mathy kid could do anything but liked more applied math and statistics, though as an econ major in college he had plenty of exposure to advanced math. But my artsy daughter almost failed an advanced math course in her senior year of high school. Fortunately, her college (where she later earned her BFA) said her admission wasn’t in jeopardy as long as she didn’t actually fail that course. The most important factor in her admission to a BFA program was probably her portfolio. But she had very good grades generally.
Some 5 or 6 years after earning her BFA – as the U.S. economy went into the tank in 2007-8 – she went deep into math prep. She took a math course at a local college. And she self-studied for a Princeton Review GMAT prep course. It turned out she did just as well on the math side as on the other side of the GMAT, and with a 720 composite score the artist got into an excellent MBA program. Her career course shifted into promoting ecological design. An important lesson for her: motivation matters. If she’s motivated and planful, her latent math ability could be useful.
Motivation is very interesting. My younger son had a habit of working just hard enough to get the B+ in his math and science courses. When he was studying for the Officer Candidate School entry test - he actually studies for months. He said he actually understood physics for the first time, and learned a bunch of engineering stuff he’d never known at all. I may have math in my name, but I rarely do anything more complicated than try to figure out the area of a lot or convert decimal feet to inches.
What all do as “grownups”, ie into our careers, is only the tip of the iceberg compared to what we learned and what was required to enter the profession, any profession.
OP- it will be interesting for you to follow your D as she finishes HS and college- seeing where she is heading into her twenties.
My usual recommendation is that if the student’s AP credit is allowed by the college for advanced placement, and the student wants to take a more advanced course for which the skipped course is a prerequisite, then the student can make a more informed decision by trying the college’s old final exams for the course that is allowed to be skipped. Then the student can know whether s/he knows the material well by the college’s standards, or needs to review a few topics, or should really repeat the entire course.
The common advice to automatically repeat one’s AP credit oftenmeans wasting time and tuition that could be used to take something else of interest while at the college. It is odd that this seems to be recommended so often on these forums for students entering college as frosh, but the people who make such recommendations never do so when a student completes calculus BC in 11th grade or earlier and wants to take more advanced math at a local college while in high school.
^this advice tends to be offered to premeds, who MUST get an A in their freshman STEM classes. It’s up to them to determine whether they’re better off “retaking” a class or skipping a weed out class. Starting right off into a weed out class you’ve not previewed would make a premed very vulnerable.
Definitely take AP calculus! Both of my kids, who were humanities majors in college, loved AP calc and found it very helpful.
Interestingly, at my D’s college they have both Calc 1 and Calc 1-no previous exposure. I don’t know the precise difference but maybe it’s b/c so many students are retaking Calc 1 that the class started moving too fast for those w/o prior exposure.
While repeating one’s AP credit is a common pre-med grade-grubbing strategy (but can backfire if the pre-med needs to mark a “repeat” on the medical school application, making the grade-grubbing too obvious), it does seem to be suggested here for non-pre-meds as well.
Some students repeating their AP credit for an “easy A” fall into the trap of paying too little attention to the course and earn a grade lower than the “easy A”. Or they find themselves competing in a grade-curved class full of other students who are also repeating their AP credit.
Perhaps they just want to separate the grade-grubbers repeating their AP credit from those taking it with the standard prerequisites of high school precalculus with trigonometry?
Nowadays, most STEM students starting at selective 4-year universities have taken some form of analysis or calculus (even if not AP!) While it’s not a prerequisite for the university in general, it’s one way of cutting students who apply to Engineering for instance. Depending on the candidate they may be admitted with Precalculus only but they usually have a reason (ie., school didn’t offer it, the only section conflicted with a graduation requirement…)
Another reason why a student who’s taken a class chooses to repeat it is that many HS classes are not the same as college classes, especially in terms of depth and approach. Therefore, the student who skips may end up lost because their HS class did not cover the same content, teachniques, concepts, or approaches as the 1st semester college course. It’s not always true, it depends on the high school.
Your advice, to ask for a “retired” final exam and take it to see whether you can or can’t skip, is a judicious one since it allows the student to estimate whether they are ready for the next level in the sequence, or not.
A likely common reason for not taking calculus in high school is the middle school placement decision made years ago. It is also likely that many engineering students start college having completed precalculus (not calculus) in high school – engineering major course maps commonly start in calculus 1.
Remember that only a small number of colleges in the US require or expect calculus in high school: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21642599/#Comment_21642599 .
^yes, in general, but most Engineering programs expect it anyway (even if the university doesn’t).
Engineering programs would prefer students to start with their calculus course anyway but the assumption is that the material isn’t entirely new. Obviously a student who’s only taken precalculus honors and done well will be okay but it’ll be harder, and Engineering is hard enough as it is…
The list linked in #33 includes cases where specific majors or divisions (e.g. engineering) want to see calculus in high school. The number of such still is not large, certainly nowhere close to “most”.
Even if we include schools with holistic or subjective admission where calculus in high school may be looked on favorably despite not being required or recommended, that still probably won’t get to “most”. For example, the majority of public universities in California that offer engineering majors admit by a formula that does not include whether calculus is taken in high school. One has its own formula that does, and some others do holistic reading (but do not explicitly require or recommend calculus in high school).
Obviously, it is a good idea for a high school student considering engineering who has calculus available to him/her to take it.
AP Cal and skip AP Literature.
Recently finalized the schedule. AP Calc, AP Lit, APBio, Honors spanish, and a few other regular classes.
Looks good.