<p>I took it junior year and already got a C in it.</p>
<p>It’s ok to get a C dude</p>
<p>Er, not in calculus. Honestly, if you can’t handle single-variable calculus, you should ask yourself if you think that you can really handle the GIRs, which include single and multivariable calc.</p>
<p>
But they do ask for your grades after admitting you, and they can always un-accept you.</p>
<p>Quick answer to original post: Yes. Many, many, many, many.</p>
<p>-McG</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And this has happened. People, for some odd reason, seem to disbelieve this.</p>
<p>Calculus is way useful at MIT… for example when determining the area under the Kresge auditorium.</p>
<p>^Don’t you mean volume? :D</p>
<p>Yeah, my mistake. I was actually trying to figure it out on my own, but I don’t have any information on the dimensions of it, just that it is 1/8th of a sphere.</p>
<p>Who wrote this?</p>
<p>“if u get in early action ur set since MIT doesn’t look at senior year grades for EA”</p>
<p>We certainly do check these things out! And if, after you’ve been admitted EA, you decide to drop all of your courses and take AP Slacking Off or High Honors Senior Slump, you get a nice email from me once I find out! And I will find out! [finger wags]</p>
<p>In all seriousness, honesty and transparency will take you far in life.</p>
<p>Damnit. </p>
<p>I was gonna switch my B period AP Calculus class to AP Slacking Off for second semester. </p>
<p>This is thoroughly disappointing [punches wall in frustration].</p>
<p>what if we drop AP Slacking Off and take regular slacking off? will that be counted against us?</p>
<p>Yes, it will be - MIT wants to see you taking the hardest possible schedule. In any case, if you don’t want to take AP Slacking Off, I would question whether you have the dedication to slacking off necessary to survive the GIR in procrastination. It’s a difficult course. When you’re two hours into putting stuff off with stupid YouTube videos, do you really have the stamina for even more singing dogs? It’s a question every applicant needs to ask themselves.</p>
<p>Also back to the original question: yes, I got into MIT after “only” taking AP Calc AB my senior year. I even got a 3 on the test. (The horrors!) I also knew people who took 18.01 with me who had never taken calc before.</p>
<p>One thing that I find frustrating about the MIT applicant pool is that people seem to think that they’re supposed to already know everything. Well guess what, the point of college is to learn things. MIT freshmen start out with calculus, bio, chem, and physics. Yet people seem to think that the only way to get in to MIT is to have already learned all of these things at a college level. In other words, they think the only way to get admitted to MIT as a freshman is to have the education level of an MIT sophomore, which clearly makes no sense. (Not that the OP said as much, it’s just a general observation I’ve made after years of talking with applicants.)</p>
<p>Taking Calc BC and acing it is integral to a successful application to MIT and to your life in general. So let’s say you don’t heed my advice and take Calc AB. So you’re at the MIT interview at a fancy restaurant, right, and your pouring a glass of wine for your interviewer while having a nice conversation. So you need to make a calculation of the rate at which the conical wine glass will fill up, right, or else it will spill all over. Sure, you could look at the glass while you do it but then you would break eye contact with your interviewer and the cardinal rule of interviewing is never, ever break eye contact with your interviewer. But no, you were a slacker and decided to take AB calculus!</p>
<p>You screw up the calculation, and your interviewer’s wine glass overflows and goes RIGHT INTO THE LAP of your interviewer. And you freak out, right, and so you take a napkin and start to pat the wine off his lap. So now your interviewer thinks your some SICK PERVERT who CAN’T DO CALCULUS. </p>
<p>AND YOUR LIFE IS RUINED. After graduation you end up pouring slurpies at 7-11, where the cups are less conical and more cylindrical–more suited to your intellectual capacity. </p>
<p>So take the calculus BC for God’s sake. What is wrong with you people?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Isn’t that an AB topic?</p>
<p>^^ I was going to say exactly the same thing, but it turned out that AB calculus did only the easy problems on that subject, and only the un-slackers could solve our given one while pulling off multiple other stunts during the interview. In calculus AB, we deal only with regular shaped objects, where the formula for the rate it’s being filled is already given to us. It’s only in BC calculus that the subtle skill of deriving the appropriate formula is developed, so as to be ready for application to arbitrary situations, such as that faced by the hapless MIT applicant above.</p>
<p>I guess. If you’re given the rate, it’s easy, but it’s also a question of how you far back you’d tip the glass in order to achieve the desired flow.</p>
<p>But why is the glass conical? Why isn’t it more of a paraboloid? In fact, the interviewer should get his own irregular and oddly contorted wine glass so that he can see that you can both derive an equation that gives the shape and find its volume integral. If you don’t master multivariable calculus by sophomore year of high school you are clearly not MIT material.</p>
<p>Sorry folks, in reality that was an abstract glass and you needed nontrivial understanding of n-forms to make any meaningful computation of volume. Not to mention a graduate level of mastery of chemistry to take into account the consistency of the fluid poured.</p>
<p>Please go ahead and count yourself out of MIT at this time.</p>
<p>You forget that glass is a liquid. You should probably be taking that into account, too, in case you pour the wine reeeeeaaaally slooooowwwwwwly…</p>