<p>Is anyone taking it this year? I took precalc as a senior in high school and I found it somewhat convoluted but easy with time and practice. I managed to pull an A-. I took my placement test and got placed into this class, but for some reason I feel nervous about college calc. Is calc supposed to be hard if I found precalc relatively easy?</p>
<p>As long as you keep up and practice enough problems it’s not that bad.</p>
<p>I took the first part of that course at my CC and passed with a C. I didn’t understand limits (which we covered at the very beginning of the course) until two weeks before finals. 
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<p>Concepts you need to know BETTER than you know the back of your hand:</p>
<p>-basic algebra (i.e. solving for a variable in an equation, do you know how to add or subtract a term from both sides? divide both sides of an equation by a coefficient? distribute and factor? take the square root of both sides of an equation?)
-slope (rise over run)
-slope ((y2-y1)/(x2-x1))
-slope (i.e. the “slantiness” of a line)
-slope (it’s important in calc I)</p>
<p>Concepts that you really ought to know if you’ve been placed into calculus but providing you can pick these concepts up on the fly and take them to heart you should be okay:
-sine is opposite over hypotenuse, cosine is adjacent over hypotenuse, tangent is opposite over adjacent
-or alternatively, SOH-CAH-TOA
-or alternatively, sine is y/r, cosine is x/r, and tangent is y/x
-logarithms and exponential functions (if I say “log A=B” then what I’m saying is “10 raised to the B power (10^B) is equal to A” and exponential functions are where you would say 10^B=A)</p>
<p>I really hope you’ve taken trig or at least covered trig in pre-calc because that will make things much easier. And the more solid your algebra the better you do, especially by calc II. Calc II weeds out a lot of students who could ace Calc I because it has a lot of handy shortcuts (you’ll see what I mean) but couldn’t do algebra.</p>
<p>sopranokitty I’m curious, what about limits confused you?</p>
<p>Hate epsilon-delta definition of a limit. Omg.</p>
<p>I took trig and two courses of algebra in high school. I think i’ll be fine, but thanks for the feedback guys.</p>
<p>The epsilon delta definition of a limit was hard to wrap my head around until I took discrete math and saw more proofs and predicate calculus and I realized it wasn’t a hard concept, it was just communicated to me in a math-y, proof-y sort of way I hadn’t had the training for and I had been over-thinking it the whole time.</p>
<p>Before you start the class learn the basics of limits, derivatives and integrals.</p>