Hi!
I’ll start off with some background. Had a really rough Freshman year. First semester 3 C+s (English, Hist, Alg2) and the rest B ranged. Second semester Freshman year and throughout Sophomore year I started a nice upward trend, moving through the B range and ending with mostly B/B+s.
Now comes Junior year. I’m taking a bit of a courseload, including AP Compsci (Hopefully pursuing major), AP Chem, and AP Calc BC. Grades overall aren’t terrible, mostly in the B/A range. But then there’s BC. No matter how hard I study, I get Ds on the test. I’ve gone in and seen my teacher, I’ve tried tutoring, but it really just doesn’t have an impact on my test scores. So with the end of first semester around the corner, I’m accepting the fact that my grade is going to be in the C range and that my upwards trend is about to be obliterated.
Now… I’m a bit unsure how to go about this. Part of me doesn’t want to give up, to push through second semester and try to work myself to a B or maybe even an A. But the other half of me looks realistically on the fact that putting in hours of work didn’t return results, and that it more than likely still won’t return results on a (probably harder) second semester. The class has had negative impacts on my social life, family dynamic… it’s all around making me miserable. This part of me wants to drop to Calculus AB.
I haven’t gone and spoken to a college counselor about this yet – I just wanted to know what other students thought about the situation before I went. Part of me wonders if it’s even possible, after all my first semester should be the equivalent of their whole year, right? Assuming if it is, I’m pondering which option is better. They’re both lose-lose, as it comes to an adcom seeing a bad grade and then a drop (but a better grade in the other class) versus a bad grade and potentially another one (Though persisting through the class).
I’m quite stuck. Any advice/experience would be greatly appreciated 
It sounds like the right move. Something isn’t clicking and continuing on the AB track at a slower pace might help. You can’t really avoid it not looking like the best, shinest transcript, but you have to deal with the situation, you can’t do everything for college and not remember that there is real learning that needs to happen–in any case, dropping down is much better than getting a D --a D is disastrous and dropping down isn’t. The important thing is to get over the hurdle of the class and whatever it is that isn’t clicking for you.Calc AB is sufficient so you will not have a deficiency in your courses.
It seems like you need tutoring from someone who knows what they are doing. But you might start with online tutorials like Khan Academy or there is a guy on youtube, name escapes me, for a different presentation of the material. My own kid got only C of HS career in Calc BC 2nd semester, was otherwise good math student, took AIME, but struggled in calc III for some reason, was able to keep attacking it talking to profs for insight, and it finally clicked and went on to be a math/cs major took many advanced math and theory classes, and went to PhD program so you can definitely overcome this.
I agree with BrownParent. Switch to AB. Sometimes, it’s best to cut your losses as we all can’t be the best at everything. There was a student in my BC Calc class that had waivered in because she hadn’t met the prerequisites. When the teacher told her kindly to drop, she refused because she wanted to prove her naysayers wrong and ended up receiving an F for the semester. She too received tutoring from this kid who took BC Calc as a sophomore (he skipped pre-calc and algebra II). In her particular case, though failing the class made her depressed, it didn’t really matter much in the end as she was accepted to the only college she planned on applying to.
I think the youtuber that BrownParent may be referring to is patrickjmt. I’ve watched some of his videos, and they definitely helped explain the content better. Also, it doesn’t hurt to get an AP prep book (Barron’s or Princeton’s) and do some practice questions. Don’t write in the book, if you want to be able to use it to study for the AP exam.