So a while back it came time to make our schedules for sr. year and at the time I didn’t think I could handle BC calc since people told me it was really hard and it included a lab and moved much faster than any traditional class. So I chose to do AB calc so I could get a better foundation in calculus for college rather than cramming in a ton of information in a limited amount of time and resorting to memorization.
But now people are telling me it was a bad idea to do this since I want to do engineering, and engineering schools will only accept kids who took BC calc because it shows they are more rigorous. That’s not the reason I’m skipping out on BC though, I want to understand the material. If students in the class were telling me they understood the material in BC but it was just a lot of work I would’ve taken it.
I was just wondering how drastically this would affect me in admissions. I mean it’s still an AP class and I’m in all AP for my other classes.
Still not true. It’s not true of the schools at the MIT/Catech level, so it’s not true of schools below that. Having said that:
You’re a year away from college. If you don’t think you can handle a class that moves at the pace of a college class, will you be able to handle the pace of an actual college class?
We’ve gone back and forth on this for our S19. He got a solid A in honors Pre-Calc and his teacher definitely said he should take BC. (You know that BC is not a completely different course, right? It moves faster because it’s all of the AB material plus more.) S19 has a tough schedule next year with APUSH, AP Lang, AP Physics, French 4 Honors and does not want to be an engineer.
Back in the winter when the kids were making their schedules, we asked for him to be put in AB Calc. The math chair thought that was a little silly but understood that he’s got a tough schedule. I was just thinking that he doesn’t really need BC and maybe this would give him an easier math class and more time to spend on his other AP classes. APUSH and AP Lang have a lot of reading and writing homework.
Fast forward to the end of the school year. S19 said everyone in his math class with his grades are taking BC. He said AB is for the non-honors Pre-Calc kids. I tried to hold my ground but he really wants to take BC. So…we switched him. I think he can do the work. It’s more of a matter of work load. Time will tell. His guidance counselor told us he can switch to AB after the first quarter if he changes his mind and the switch won’t show on his transcript.
I think you need to take your whole schedule into account when making this decision. And be honest about how well you did in pre-calc. And ask around to find out how different AB and BC is at your school. We asked lots of kids and got many opinions before deciding BC might be ok.
I don’t think you’ll have a problem getting into an engineering school with AB. But, I will say that kids at our very competitive public high school who took AB didn’t have the best success. That might be because there were plenty of kids who took BC (probably 60 out of the 700 in the class) so the AB calc kids may have been competing against them when it came to admissions.
I thought HN Pre-Calc was fairly easy. This was because half the year was like a review from Algebra 2, and I didn’t find the new stuff hard at all. I have an A+ as of now (We’ll see what happens with the final) and got by with very little stress, in fact I’d even go on to say it was one of my least stressful classes. Limits and derivatives gave me no trouble. However, I know I only received a very basic education on derivatives and BC calc would be a whole other story. I do have a very difficult schedule, however, with all AP so I am really not sure what to do.
The key thing is whether you can handle the BC. If you can, definitely go for it. Even for top engineering schools, they still have freshmen taking Calc1 or Calc 2.
