<p>If i didnt take precalculus in high school, do i just take Calculus 1 for freshman year in college? And if i do just skip and go to Calculus I will i struggle badly?</p>
<p>that's not a good idea. you should take precalc in summer school or a remedial class in college. worst comes to worst, buy a precalc book from amazon or something and self-study. you don't need to know everything from it, but you definitely need to understand limits, the unit circle, the graphs of some basic yet recurring functions in calc, etc. most of precalc prepares you for the trigonometry that comes up in calculus.</p>
<p>Pre-calc isn't that useful, at least to me...</p>
<p>Limits gonna cover in Calc I (basic limit) and II (limit to infinity and improper integration); Unit Circle, Basic function, Trigo. function should be learned in HS Trigo. or HS Algebra...</p>
<p>Also, there isn't much trigonometry comes up in calculus, except you D and In the trigo and hyperbolic function. Most of the trigo identity can be found in the calc book cover....</p>
<p>If I were you and having a good foundation in Trigo, or Algebra in HS, I would just go to Calc I.</p>
<p>Alg II and trig are all you will need.</p>
<p>have you had trig yet? a lot of high schools combine trig and precalc.</p>
<p>Yeah i took Functions ,Statistics, and Trig and then AP statistics. So I just need to take a remedial class, and then i can do Calculus I? Or am i fine with just going strait to Calculus I?</p>
<p>You took those stuff before, and I really think that you should be fine to go on to Calc I.</p>
<p>If you really worry about that, you can visit the following website <a href="http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/AllBrowsers/2413/2413.asp%5B/url%5D">http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/AllBrowsers/2413/2413.asp</a>
Go to the Review and see do you understand most of the stuff. If so, you should be fine.</p>
<p>BTW, you can also start to learn Limit on your own. Limit should be a new concept to you. The more time you see it, the better it would be.</p>
<p>your college most likely wont let you jump to Calc I. i took precalc in high school and got an A and i still had to pass a certain test in order to be able to take "calc I".</p>
<p>Cronus88, I think it might depend on which college.
The college that I am in can let people take Calc I if they have taken Pre-Calc, or 650 or better SAT Math score, or 29 or better ACT Math score, or 90 or better College-Level Math CPT score. So, it should be vary from college to college, and SAT/ACT might help him to qualify that...</p>
<p>see i didnt have a separate class for trig so i dont know. a lot of the things i still use from precalc, such as trig identities, the unit circle, half angle formulas, etc. you probably learned in trig. </p>
<p>you definitely need to know limits, which you probably don't. a lot of my precalc class was spent practicing graphing fundamental functions. at the time, i thought it was pointless but now im glad i know them because i can easily picture graphs in my head and can tell if a derivative (slope) or an integration (area under the graph) is close or not based on what the graph looks like. (remember you don't use calculators in calculus so if you can't picture a graph, you're in trouble)</p>
<p>The only thing that really helped me from Pre-Calculus was the unit circle and getting familiar with it. Other than that, you may or may not have it retaught to you in Calculus 1. I guess it depends on the professor. </p>
<p>The difference between my AP Calc class in HS and my Calc 1 class in college was I had went from depending on a Calculator to not being able to use one at all (which is very possible in Calculus).</p>
<p>you will fail calc unless you are really good in alegrba and trig. Your school wont let you take calc, and when you take the placement test you will have to go into remedial math.</p>
<p>I had to do it.</p>
<p>if you know how to do algebra and trig you should be fine. do not be learning them alongside calculus</p>
<p>to be honest most of fatal mistakes in calculus come from forgetting to do some algebra.</p>
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you will fail calc unless you are really good in alegrba and trig.
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<p>you would have to try really hard to fail calc 1. The algebra you use is basic stuff.</p>
<p>to be honest most of fatal mistakes in calculus come from forgetting to do some algebra.</p>
<p>My Calculus teacher would always say that and I agree.</p>
<p>when I took calc 1, which I had to take 2 times, the algebra was the most intense stuff I have ever seen, I did very well in algebra, geometry and trig, did really well in pre-calc, but the algebra I saw in calc 1 i never saw before., if you were not a 100% master of algebra you would fail.</p>
<p>My calc 1 class was a algebra test with some fundamentals of calculus.</p>
<p>Unless you haven't been doing well in math, just get a precalc book and study it over the summer, or take a summer class. It's not worth it to waste a quarter/semester during college since there's already so much classes to take to prep for upper division engineering. </p>
<p>I took two precalc quarter classes during my first year at community college and we don't really use a lot of it during the calculus sequences. And after you study from the precalc book, you can always review what you need to know without much loss of time as these things come up during calculus. Because I wasted those two quarters, I pretty much delayed my transfer to UCLA by almost a year. I really regretted that I didn't take the initiative to study these things on my own and instead wasted time during the schoolyear.</p>
<p>It really depends on the teacher. If you have a good teacher, you can probably just learn as you go.</p>