Hi, I struggled in person after covid as a sophomore and took ap calc ab. For context, I accelerated summer doing precalc and got an A so decided to take ap calc ab (due to peer pressure) as a sophomore. In hindsight did not realize my basics were not strong but much later. I sadly got my first ever C on transcript and second sem was C+. Al though I heard advice to drop since I want to major in CS or Computer engineering I wanted to give it a hard shot and stuck on. This year sadly I do have a tutor but got a C first sem AP Calc BC. It is too late to drop however good part is for ap calc ab I can retake my class online and that grade can replace overall gpa but C will also show. Any thoughts how this will impact admissions? I am having a talk with my math chair and really want to work hard for semester 2 since I know in college I will need to be good at calculus anyway but wondering if anyone went through similar struggles and can share ideas. thanks.
It all depends on how motivated you are, but you could buy the Schaum series book with 3000 problems in calculus, and get through some reasonable portion of them. You should do most of the problems yourself. Reading math or reading someone’s solution doesn’t work. I mean you can look up the first few solutions. There are solutions for every problem. As a soccer coach once told me, there is no substitute to touching the ball. As many times as you can. This will fix your calculus problems.
My first reaction here is NOT to be concerned about college admissions. Instead, the first thing to think about is that calculus is very useful in a significant number of other courses that you are going to want to take in the future.
The only students who should ever consider taking calculus this early are ones who are very good at math. Students who are very good at math might in the future want to study more math, or calculus-based physics, or engineering, or something else that depends upon calculus.
To me it sounds like you might not be solid on the prerequisites. How comfortable / solid do you feel about algebra, trigonometry, and pre-calculus? How did you do for example in trigonometry?
Thanks. Up until AP Calculus I always aced math in algebra 2 honors (was virtual due to pandemic year) and precalc online was in summer though and aced it hence even went down the path of AP Calc AB in 10th grade. In hindsight looks like obviously I missed some basics and trying to figure out options now but dont know how retakes will be perceived.
rurci3 is a quiz on precalculus topics that may help you find out what topics from precalculus you may need to review.
I think that again my main concern is making sure that you understand calculus and will be ready to use it when you need to.
Do you know whether you are having trouble with the concepts, or with remembering all the formulae, or applying the formulae to solve problems, or something else?
If you truly understand calculus, you should be able to re-derive the formulae from some recollection of basic principles and your recollection of trigonometry. At one point during an exam in university I did forget a couple of the formulae, and I did need to re-derive the formulae from basic principles before finishing the exam (fortunately it was not a particularly long exam).
You could go over this with your tutor, and also go over example problems as they might appear on exams and talk about techniques for solving the problems.