***AP Calculus AB Thread 2016-2017***

@mundanewarrior, sorry, I completely forgot to reply! I haven’t used Barron’s that frequently yet, but it’s pretty well organized and seems good so far.

New to this thread! We just finished integration and we will test on it next week/the week after. My teacher goes really fast because we will review for the AP test for a month. Has anyone bough any supplemental study tools?

Barron’s it is then.

Anyone taking BC here?

@mundanewarrior I’m taking it now! At my school, I can take AB for half the year and BC the second half.

@mundanewarrior Oh no we’ve also covered techniques of integration too. U substitution and reverse chain rule and all that. I don’t know if there is more. That’s what I meant by everything related.

@Mathophile26 Is it significantly more difficult than AB? Looking at the topics, I see a whole a chapter on series and convergence, which looks like Hebrew to me.

@HelloThereHola There is more: Powers of sine/cosine, trigonometric substitutions, integration by parts, partial fractions, and finally definite integrals. Once that’s done, there’s applications of integration (area under a curve), which is relatively easier.

@mundanewarrior Most of those that you mentioned are actually BC topics (I don’t know about all of them but integration by parts and partial fractions definitely are). I should probably learn them anyways though. And definite integrals we’ve already covered. I love calculus.

I was also wrong! Integration isn’t as hard as my class made it out :)) My teacher gave us a take home test (first one) and I am going through it with relative ease.

@HelloThereHola

So you’re not taking BC? Why not? You’ll get an AB subscore anyway.

When you “love” something, you start finding it easy. :smiley:

@mundanewarrior, it does seem more difficult. AB topics are definitely just the foundation, and then you go into more complicated integrals, areas under the curve, etc. And it’s all just even more complicated by bringing in parametric and polar graphs (parametric is fairly simple, but areas for polar curves are hard). I’m dreading series - I’ve never been that great at them, so I’m not sure how hard it’ll be :(. Overall, though, the concepts are interesting!

@mundanewarrior My school divides it into AB one year and then BC next. I guess I might as well wait til next year since that’s the way it is.

@Mathophile26 Looks like I have a long way to go. I hadn’t until today seen a polar curve.
But I read this article and it makes it look pretty simple (since it is formula based) and interesting: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcII/PolarArea.aspx

Throughout my senior year, I've been breezing through my classes. I guess I've finally found something more challenging. It'll be fun.

@HelloThereHola That doesn’t make sense. The two courses (Calc I and II) are each a semester long in college. I personally think that in every school there should be a “fast track” option for students who find Calculus (and Math in general) easy, so that they don’t have to “waste” a whole year on BC, since it’s only a few extra topics.

@mundanewarrior, thanks for the link! It looks really helpful :slight_smile:

@Mathophile26 That site is pretty helpful in general (for calculus, at least). Their cheat sheets are nice.
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/cheat_table.aspx

@mundanewarrior, I now remember I used one of those cheat sheets for my AB final :slight_smile: It’s a great site!

@Mathophile26 Wait, so you get to use a cheat sheet in your exam? That is just wow! The education system here is based entirely on rote memorization. That means one needs to memorize an entire 1000 page book for a 3 hour exam.

@mundanewarrior, that was unclear wording on my part. I used it to study for the exam, not to take it :).

@Mathophile26 That makes less sense. I guess you meant “review”, not “study”. But yeah, the point is that site is helpful.

Another helpful resource for me has been Wolfram Alpha. It can solve pretty much anything. And it shows a step by step solution for the same.

Since I’m taking AB this year (junior), would it be a good idea to to BC next year? I’ll probably be doing calc in college and I don’t want to have a gap between high school and college with math…

@NYhomeschooler What gap? You do realize that you are studying college level content, right?

Not a gap in content, a time gap