Hi I am a current softmore at a public high school and took at pre-calc class at a local community college so I could take Calc my softmore year. Unfortunetly the Calc BC class was full so I have to take AB. I will have to take BC next year. How will this look for my chances at the HYSPM? Can I explain this situation somehow in the common app or other parts of my application. I am a strong math student with lots of extracurriculars in math and I am confident in my abilities to get an A and 5’s on the AP tests. Also BC is the highest class offered at my high school, what classes do you reccomend I take after BC that could give me some college credit and mabye save tuition?
There is nothing to explain and colleges will not care. Your GC can mention it if needed.
I am a strong math student with lots of extracurriculars in math and I am confident in my abilities to get an A and 5’s on the AP tests. Also BC is the highest class offered at my high school, what classes do you reccomend I take after BC that could give me some college credit and mabye save tuition?
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You really should have thought about that before committing to summer school. But after BC, the usual sequence is multivariabke and linear algebra. But any college credit will likely be limited to your instate public or a very small number if privates that offer challenge exams.
To get college credit you can take AP Statistics, if it’s offered. That’s what my D will do Senior year after BC this year.
The elusive “save tuition” only works if you can cut off at least an entire semester from college . Tuition is typically a flat rate per semester, so AP credits often just allows you to accelerate in certain areas and take more electives. My older D’s engineering curriculum, for example, has a set of required engineering courses over four years. You can bring in a ton of AP credits and it will just free up time for electives over those four years, with few exceptions.
Our local CC offer Multivariate Calc and Liner Algebra, but I’d rather she wait and learn that at a top university rather than CC.
She’s doing enrichment via MIT’s Open Courseware (Discrete Math via “Mathematics for Computer Science” to start), a local math circle/ARML/PuMAC/AMC/etc. (though the competitions also may be limited this year), and similar options.
Once you’re through BC in high school, I don’t think there’s a lot of incremental value for admissions in moving further.
If your goal is to save money on tuition it only works if you have enough credits to graduate at least a semester early and don’t have classes that are in a fixed sequence that don’t work with finishing early. You also need to matriculate at a school that offers the right type of credits for classes in order graduate early. Sometimes people do take extra classes including summer classes to graduate early and perhaps save a bit that way.
This is not always true. My D was able to go part time her final semester and pay by the credit. We ended up saving about half of the tuition that semester. This was at Pitt. I suspect many large publics are similar.
Yes, I should have said “almost always”. There are exceptions to just about everything.
Our experience has been different. Our high school offers MVC and LA on campus to 4-6 seniors each year through an arrangement with the local community college. The students who’ve completed Calc BC as juniors and just do AP Stats instead have worse outcomes in UCB/UCLA engineering and CS admissions than those who take MVC.
But the situation in a school without MVC as a course option for top students (and without the student by student comparisons within the high school that UCB/UCLA use for instate admissions) would not be the same.
Thanks for your help! I am most worried that colleges will see I took ab my softmore year and bc my junior year and see that as a lack of mathamatical skill as some students at my school can jump from precalc to calc bc but I took precalc over summer and was planing on taking bc but since it is full I am stuck with ab. Will I look worse or better in my path of precalc at a cc and ab soft, bc junior vs precalc soft, and bc junior that most top math students at my school take.
Here is the reality - you’re overthinking.
While you will soends hours and hours on an applucation, an AO will spend 10-12 minutes. There is not enough time to think what you propose. They will not question your mathematical ability because you took AB followed by BC - which BTW is a common sequence in many schools.