As part of my conditions of transfer acceptance, I have to complete Calculus 1B before the Fall. Anyone taken Calculus @ Cal that can share their experience in terms of difficulty and class size, etc? I could just finish it up at my community college but it’s also intriguing to take it at Cal. Trying to decide if I have a better chance at a B or higher at my CC or if I will get slaughtered at Cal lol.
It really depends on the level of your community college Calc 2 class in my opinion. My CC has a strong math department, so they usually have the same rules as any other 4-yr university: such as no-make up exams, no calculators, and few teachers provide extra credit opportunities. The instructors don’t “take you by the hand” in the sense that it does feel like a college course, so it’s not a breeze at all and you have to dedicate a lot of time (hardest calc class imho).
One girl who is transferring told me that most advisors suggest no more than 13 units for the first semester because everybody needs time to adapt and get used at how things work at Berkeley, so if you’re not very confident with calc 2, I’d take it at CC during summer instead. The contents seem to be the same (Stewart chapters 5 to 10 or something like that). Good luck!
Thank you @smsk, that’s what I was leaning towards and I think I will do. My CC has the same rules in the math dept as well and my Calc 1 professor suggested we don’t take Calc 2 in the summer but I don’t have a choice as its a part condition of admission to Cal.
UCB math course outlines:
https://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/lowerdivcourses
Old exams:
https://tbp.berkeley.edu/courses/math/
You can look over the course outlines for MATH 1A and 1B and try the old final exams for MATH 1A to see how ready you are for MATH 1B.
@ucbalumnus thank you!
One other thing to consider: if you already have more than 70 semester units of community college credit, additional community college units will not add to the units needed to reach 120 to be eligible to graduate, but they will also not add to the units that can force you into the unit ceiling if you are in L&S. So the choice of taking MATH 1B at UCB or a community college can be good or bad either way in this sense.
https://ls.berkeley.edu/advising/planning/enrolling/unit-ceiling
https://ls.berkeley.edu/advising/planning/schedule-planning
@ucbalumnus I totally had not thought about this, taking it at a CCC makes a lot more sense. Thanks for bringing this up!!
Yeah, I agree, that’s definitely something to consider since all UCs have a limit of units you can take (ceiling).
So, if you’re planning to minor in something else (or a double-major), I’d totally save my units for classes that help me achieve those goals instead!