I agree with Techno. AP Calc won’t be a requirement or highly expected at any art school. (Architecture could be a different story.) It could be more helpful at a larger university, depending on what major and minor fields are chosen. But if she has excellent credentials, an excellent portfolio, and has completed a good and diverse curriculum, she doesn’t have to be outstanding in math – just good. Above all, she needs an excellent portfolio.
My daughter applied only to art schools and programs. She refused to even apply to our state flagship(s). “I don’t want to find myself in college sitting next to students from my high school.” She wanted to break out, though kept close contact (even to this day, many years later) with several of her high school cohort.
And so she applied to RISD, CMU, SCAD, MICA, and KCAI. She got into all of them. But an issue came up after she was admitted. In her last semester in HS she was performing very poorly in an advanced math class. I think she had the ability but by Spring of her senior year she was running out of gas. She had already committed to RISD. She contacted the school and was told that as long as she didn’t fail that class her admission would still be good.
I’m not recommending that anyone else take this as a simple lesson. But I think it says something more broadly. Art schools are mainly interested in artistic, creative talent. True they also value the ability to think in logical and mathematical terms. And my daughter was intent on majoring in Industrial Design. But her past math performance already showed that she had ability in that area. The RISD admissions office told her, “Just don’t flunk that math class, because you need to pass it to meet all of your curricular requirements for admission.” She focused on that course the last few weeks and passed the course, but not with a grade that she could be proud of. She attended RISD.
Later on, after working a few years in the economy in industrial design she decided she wanted to earn an MBA. To prep for the GMAT she took a college-level refresher course in math, and she self-studied intensely for the exam using a Princeton Review program. She got excellent scores on both sides of the GMAT and was admitted to a top-10 business school. She had the math, the artistic ability, and also the business mind to carry her career to a new level.