I’m thinking of taking Calculus 1 over this upcoming summer (depending on how I do next semester in Trig) and was wondering whether I should do Calc 1 through Art of Problem Solving or my local community college. Have any of you had experiences with either, and which one would you recommend?
If you will be pre-med or pre-law in college, be aware that college courses taken while in high school do count for GPA calculation when applying to medical or law school. So if you earn an A or A+ in the college calculus course, that will help pre-load your college GPA in a good way, but if you earn a lower grade, that will pre-load your college GPA in a bad way.
Note also that colleges may offer different calculus courses. There may be a regular calculus course suitable for math, physics, and engineering majors, and an easier one suitable for business majors (though business majors are generally allowed to take the harder regular calculus course). Choose appropriately according to your interests.
@ucbalumnus Will keep all this in mind—many thanks!
I really don’t suggest taking Calc 1 as a summer course. Calc 1 is a very foundational course. The time frame can be very compressed. Maybe as few as 8 weeks. Have you taken any college classes at a normal 16 week pace?
@Eeyore123 I’m taking Pre-Calculus through my local university this year.
I do plan on going to grad school, by the way, but not premed or anything—I want to get a PhD in math.
In that case, precalculus or calculus taken at a college while in high school will not be as relevant as upper level and graduate level math courses taken as an undergraduate, and undergraduate research and recommendations derived from such. However, you will still have to manage transcripts from all colleges attended when applying to PhD programs.
I am currently reading the AoPS calculus BOOK, and I will tell you it will teach you much better than your local community college (starts from the basics, and then goes to early putnum style questions) would HIGHLY recommend
If you want to go further in math it seems hard to beat AoPS with a CC course.
DS did the AoPS Calc course and as he could not get credit for it he took AP Calc BC the next semester. We had read that taking the AoPS Calc course by itself would not be enough to get a 5 on the exam but we figured it would. When he started the AoPS BC course, the material was not hard but the format of the questions was different such that it took practice of doing the BC questions to master them. He said AoPS was very theoretical so he understood it very well. He made a 5 on the BC exam, as very many do.
Good luck!
Thank you all! The AoPS course will be cheaper than the CC course, so I think I may go with that.
If you really want a highly rigorous calculus course, you can go through Caltech’s Ma 1a on your own.
http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2014-15/1term/ma001a/
@CavaFans2003 Maybe I can provide a bit of an insight. @Eeyore123 is right. I took a precalculus course over the past summer in a 5 week time frame. Because I had to learn so much in such a short amount of time, I kind of had to cram all of that information in. If you simply want an A in the course, go for it. I was able to finish precalculus with a 98%. But if you truly want to understand calculus, I would recommend taking a class that lasted about a semester. That way, your brain would be able to suck up all of that glorious knowledge and keep it in.
I totally forgot the Pythagorean identities and most of the radians on the unit circle and so on. There are some things that I have to relearn.
A compromise option would be the self-paced Calculus class offered through U of Wisconsin. This would give you the time flexibility of the AoPS class, but with college credit. More expensive though, so it depends how highly you value the transferable credit and the flexible format. https://il.wisconsin.edu/course-catalog/calculus-i/u3600-114-4o/
@aquapt Thank you! I’ll look into this course.
I think my school will be offering Calculus 1 over the summer, during a principal’s council meeting today my principal mentioned all courses in the district will be offered this summer, so if it’s offered I’m going to take it.