I agree, schools assume in their curricula that students will have had pre-calc in their senior year. That’s different than wanting them to start in Calc 1. I was just clarifying so that the OP understands that schools don’t force students to start in Calc 1 if they’ve taken higher maths. I don’t think that’s what you were intending to say, but that’s what the words meant.
1 Like
Why does this have any relationship to when they took the class? Essentially what that would be saying is that they just didn’t teach Algebra I and Geometry very well the first time around. Rather than make the solution holding the students back, why not address the root cause of the problem?
Because the Ivys and MIT were put on the same pedestal as representing the pinnacle of engineering.
I certainly wouldn’t refer to any of them as trade schools. You might call MIT a technical school, but it’s not. It has a school of humanities, arts and social sciences and school of management.
Which one? Cornell? Penn? Princeton?
1 Like
Brown. It is a school for UPS delivery drivers
2 Likes
Good one! 
Which is pretty much what the secondary school is implying. The secondary school isn’t attributing a cause- poor teaching? poor syllabus? - they are just reacting how those kids do in their calc classes, and they have found that too many of the kids who took those classes in those grades are coming through with holes in their foundation.
I’m guessing that the secondary school has very little control over what an unrelated middle school does.
2 Likes
Probably. This is hard for me to wrap my head around because my junior high was very good and my son went to a college prep school that started in 7th grade and continued through HS. I’ve never had to question the quality of our educations.
IME that makes you exceptionally lucky!
1 Like
I’d say privileged is the right word. Luck had nothing to do with it.
1 Like
They can’t require it because not every high school offers calculus but the highly competitive colleges (even for non-stem majors) expect Calculus. Adcoms are clear on this, it’s the first math course they look for in a transcript, if you don’t have it, rigor will be a concern. The 10th, 11th or 12th grade is not as big a deal, sure.
1 Like
Olin did say that they expect students to have completed BC.
1 Like
She won’t be hurt by it AND it sounds like she’ll have had excellent math prep when she heads off to college.
Private schools that take kids from lots of different middle schools tend to be pretty good at placement – they have to do this for virtually every admitted student. They also tend to have a good system in place for identifying when the placement is wrong and for addressing it.
and once that trade school, MIT, put Calculus on it’s recommended hs course list, you better believe people aren’t interpreting that as optional.
2 Likes
I remember like it was yesterday interviewing the heads of school of both the public and private options. We asked what they did with kids that are ahead. The public said they make them repeat 7th grade math. The private said they’d put him in whatever class we wanted to put him in and that after three weeks we’ll all know what class he should be in. I prefer schools that aren’t dogmatic that evaluate every individual.
1 Like
Based on the first post in this thread, the high school puts the usual four years of high school math into three years, so its math courses are “larger” than those at many other schools. So a math course taken elsewhere may not fit nearly into the high school’s math courses.
1 Like
If she can make room in her 9th grade schedule, she could ask about taking Alg I and Geometry concurrently so that she can move on to AlgII/precalc sophomore year - geometry should be perfectly manageable this way - it’s just a matter of how it would impact the rest of her schedule and her workload. It depends in part on whether she’s keen to take additional higher math senior year (multivariable calc or linear algebra). If forging ahead isn’t that important to her in terms of her internal motivations and goals, then it’s not worth stressing about. It’s important to take calculus in high school, for a student with her interests and goals, but not that important whether it happens in junior year or senior year. Competitive STEM programs are looking for rigor, and for some kids, an accelerated math curriculum is the way to show that they’re seeking challenge; but it sounds like the rigor of your daughter’s HS program is well known so there’s really no worry on that front.
There’s one caveat here. Some schools require students to take AB/BC sequentially. Others allow students to take BC in lieu of AB because AB is essentially wholly contained in BC. My son’s school used to do the former, but now they do the latter and teach MVC. I would not sweat this at all if her school lets her take BC. Even if they don’t she’ll still technically be ahead with AB under her belt.
https://www.olin.edu/content/what-were-looking/ does not specifically say BC.
While calculus appears to be widely (but not universally) offered in US high schools (although middle school math placement can prevent some students from taking it), BC (or equivalent through IB, dual enrollment, etc.) is probably limited to a significantly smaller subset of US high schools.
They said that directly to us while we were there. 