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It is up to the school’s policy and at the math dean’s discretion.
Pre-calculus will cover polar coordinate, logrithm and some more advance algebra which you will be using in Caclulus II (mostly).</p>
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Sure. But where? at local community college?</p>
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We’ve been getting many of these AP questions, so let’s address this.</p>
<p>People take AP courses for three primary reasons:
(1) look better on their transcript (i.e. college admission)
(2) exempted from its future equivalent college course
(3) if (2) is not met or/and extending (2), for college course preparation </p>
<p>(1) is self-explanatory. </p>
<p>(2) At your future college, you may earn the equivalent course credits with the AP credits. However, the policies vary by colleges, as well as by your major.</p>
<p>If you are an engineering major, and you have AP credits for Physics B exam, you probably won’t be able to use that to get credits for the calculus-based Physics 1 course. Note this is just a stereotypical policy. Some schools may grant you the credits. I can’t say with certainty. Some schools even have placement exams so if you don’t pass the placement exams your 5 on the AP exam can be useless.</p>
<p>I.e. Before taking any AP courses, make sure you are familiar with policy that each school has. Also, your HS may not offer certain AP courses, but you can still the AP exams. For example, AP Physics C (it’s only an extra exam booklet), AP Macro, AP Micro.</p>
<p>That being said, you should still take at least one AP course in high school. For example, take AP English to place yourself out of the freshman seminar. Take AP Computer Science, so you can place yourself out of computer science course, if CS “is not critical” in your study (programming is a useful tool). </p>
<p>(3) is also very self-explanatory. I didn’t take AP calculus. I had high school calculus, but my early encounter with calculus prepared me for college calculus. To me, the first semester of calculus was reinforcement. So AP courses are not essential. I had AP Chem and AP Physics, but due to healthy issue I didn’t complete either course. I was there for a few months, so I did get to see the typical problems and material which would be cover in its equivalent college courses.</p>
<p>Getting ahead is always good, but not necessary. Sometime you will change your “ideal career” just because you’ve taken these AP courses. You may suddenly like Physics, or hate chemistry.</p>
<p>Like the previous poster said - the greatest advantage of AP credits is that you may shorten your undergraduate study by a semester or two. Some freshman carry 20~30 credits and when they enter college they are already sophomore.</p>
<p>However, getting too much ahead isn’t always a good thing. I had one upperclassman who carry a year of AP credits with him, and he failed his calculus 3 just because he had a hard time doing some simple integrations, and he got 5 on most of the AP exams. Now that was a very unfortunate failure. He didn’t pass his electromagnetic because he didn’t remember the stuff.
So yeah. Sometime it is better to re-take certain “major” courses just to play safe.</p>