How many engineers skip calc one?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Tufts University
1

<p>Hello,</p>

<p>I'm going to Tufts next year for engineering. My school only offers AP Calc AB and my teacher doesn't exactly teach for the exam. Obviously i'm going to put a lot of effort into the AP exam on my own time, but if i dont get that magic Five will I be one of the few engineers at Tufts/elsewhere who doesn't skip calc one? </p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

2

<p>Things might have changed a bit since when I was there, but IIRC, most engineers took Calc I even if they had passed the AP just as a refresher. Also, AB covers most of the material in Calc I. BC is Calc I and II.</p>

3

<p>My D is a freshmen. She took AP Calc AB and scored a 5, but was planning on taking Calc I. Her advisor convinced her to take Math 50(?) which did a brief review of Calc I and then covered all of Calc II.</p>

4

<p>Math 50 is probably a slightly harder class than it needs to be, but my engineer friend who took it thought it was all right (he ended up with an A-). It was a class of 25 students or so, almost all of whom were engineers. My friend has an A/A+ in Math 13 (Calc III) right now, so clearly it prepared him just as well as Math 12 would have.</p>

<p>From looking at the [Course</a> List](<a href=“Tufts User Authentication - Stale Request”>Tufts User Authentication - Stale Request) for next fall, it looks like McNinch and Offerman are teaching one section of Math 11 (Calc I) each and Wolf is teaching two sections of it. I haven’t heard great things about McNinch, I haven’t heard of Offerman before, and I know that Wolf is a solid teacher.</p>

<p>My advice is to take Math 11 with Wolf if you can and try to take Math 50 if you can’t. You certainly won’t be the only engineer in the class either way. You have plenty of time to take Math 12, 13, and 38 over the next two years, and you really want to get a good foundation in basic calculus now.</p>

5

<p>My son is in Mech Engineering. He took BC Calc in HS and went right into Math 13 (Calc 3) with no problem, and then took Math 38 (DiffEQ) second semester freshman year. I don’t think he found this hard to do, and skipping right past Calc 1 and 2 (Math 11 and 12) gave him some very useful flexibility.</p>