Agree it’s ridiculous. Only a “college-level” course in a remedial sense (technically offered for the purpose of catching people up to where they should have been).
I totally thought that was a joke when I first saw it. People have been joking about that exact fake AP class for years.
I suspect the real motivation is money, plain and simple. 1) You get kids who are on the AP Calc tract to take an extra AP course a year before they do AP Calc AB or BC. 2) You can get kids who were not as advanced in math who otherwise would not have taken an AP math course to take it.
I suspect the fake ostensive reason is it allows kids who are less advanced or from schools with less developed math programs to benefit from an AP math class.
As it is now, it seems that some students are tempted to take the math off-ramp to AP statistics (instead of precalculus) in order to get an extra AP course on their record.
Some can take both now, many schools don’t offer AP Stats, and some school districts are actively pushing Stats for many kids (such as the CA state curriculum proposal or what SF schools are doing) as the default math path instead of Calc.
I agree it’s ridiculous. (However, there are 2-year colleges that give college credit for pre-algebra as well). But…
(1) The AP tests provide some, albeit minimal, protection against grade inflation and rigor dilution on the part of high schools.
(2) With this mad rush to calculus, a lot of students enter college “knowing” calculus, but can’t set up problems on their own. Sure you can say “take this derivative” and they can, but they can’t solve even basic minimum-maximum problems. This may help that. Certainly it’s an opportunity for students to learn at least some analytic geometry.
(3) If there are educational benefits as I described, I am sure they are accidental or side effects.
To be honest, this makes total sense. Precalculus is a non-remedial, credit bearing class at many universities (including my T20), often taken by first year students, meaning the College Board technically is keeping the spirit of AP in the new AP Precalculus course.
But surely extra cash from more AP tests is the true ulterior motive.
What’s ironic is that it’s totally unnecessary. College Board already offers a CLEP exam in pre calculus. And you can take a pre-calculus class online at Modern States for free, which will get you a voucher to take the exam for free.
Some private T20s do have an equivalent precalculus course, like Princeton MAT 100, or embed it into an extended first semester single variable calculus course, like Harvard Math Ma - Mb.
However, it can be considered “remedial”, since the non-advanced fourth year of high school math is supposed to be precalculus.
I’m well aware of that. But offering the course and granting credit are 2 separate things. And since Princeton does not give credit for AP Stats and Harvard gives no AP credit, I simply refer one back to my prior post.
