Right now I am a freshman in honors algebra 2. I have always been very good at math, and I have never struggled in it.
I want to take Calculus next year, so that I can take AP Mech next year as well (it has to be concurrent in my school). However, precalculus is required before Calculus in my school, but I don’t want to take it. I asked several juniors and seniors, and they told me that the precalculus class is only class discussion, meaning that every day students are in groups and they solve some problems. There are only a few tests throughout the course, and the topics are very similar to Algebra 2, as they told me. From what they said, pre-calculus is definetly one of the easy classes if you had no trouble with Algebra 2.
So there is this option to take the final exam of a course, and get credit for it. I am thinking of studying the pre-calculus topics over the summer, then take the exam, and take AP Calculus BC my sophomore year.
So my question is would you guys recommend taking Calculus without explicitly taking pre-calculus? I want to hear the opinions of other people.
No, I think this is not a good idea. Too much of math builds upon itself and you want a very solid foundation, not a rush through. Take your school’s normal math progression. It’s set up that way for a reason.
I would suggest talking to actual precalculus and BC teachers at your school rather than simply listening to students say it is easy. There may be useful info you only get directly from the teachers.
Is there a pre-calculus class you can take somewhere in the summer? Maybe online or at a local college?
I am also not a fan of cramming a year of math into a short period of time, but I am even less of a fan of self-studying something as important as this.
There is zero reason to take this risk with your math foundation to take these classes sophomore year. There are two more years of high school after that. No need to speed up and then come back here next year complaining that you have run out of math at your high school. You can take Physics C later in high school as well.
Precalculus is important for a good foundation so don’t skip that. If you are good at maths then you can skip AP Calculus AB and go directly to AP Calculus BC as BC classes covers AB stuff as well.
No. For all the reasons mentioned above.
No reason to take this as a sophomore. You should have a foundation in bio and chem, and most HS’s require an intro physics course as well.