I’m a senior and applying to school and I was honestly wondering if I needed to take Precal my senior year of highschool or can I take it my freshman year of college? The teacher whk teaches it even admitting to not having a kid make above an 85 in her whole 10 years of teaching and I’m really bad at math. She doesn’t offer tutoring help and is the only precal teacher.
My goal is to major in English or Journalism and eventually go into medical school after I get all my required sciences, but I was just wondering if Precal is a must? The alternative math for 12th graders is College Algebra and Triginomatry.
Yes. If your goal is med school, you will need calculus, so you should not, IMO, be wasting precious time in college taking precalc.
As an FYI, “my teacher sucks/is too hard/doesn’t give A’s, etc.” is an acceptable excuse for nobody. There are plenty of internet resources to assist you.
Agree, you should definitely take pre-calc in HS. In fact many pre-med students will have taken calc in HS.
Agree that a “hard teacher” is no reason to skip a course. You will certainly run across some “hard teachers” in college as well. Find the resources (online, tutor, etc.) you need to help you get through precalc.
If you are “really bad” at math you may stay flexible in terms of your career goals as you will have to take and excel in classes like calculus, chem, and physics (which do involve some level of math) as part of your med school prerequisites.
I agree with @skieurope and @happy1, if you are going to be premed, then you need precalc now so that you can take calculus next year. This would also be true for most STEM majors.
If you are premed in college, then you are going to run into classes that are more difficult that high school pre-calculus.
If you are bad at math, then you might need to get help from a tutor outside of your school. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and learning how to do well enough in your weakest subjects is one skill that you will need going forward.
Reasonably, if you’re bad at math, premed isn’t in the cards (you’d have to be better than 80% classmates at calculus when they’ve already taken the class, so forget it). So, focus on journalism. Take College Algebra and Trigonometry, make sure you’re really strong in humanities and social science, apply to Mizzou *and focus on English/critical thinking/journalism.
or Knox, Denison, Kalanazoo, Eckerd... Plus ypur flagahip...Depending on your current GPA/test scores