<p>But get a 5 on the BC exam, will MIT (or any school for that matter) ignore my AB score? I made A LOT of careless errors and I'm scared I'll get a 4. Math is my best subject, but I was a little nervous that day and rushed through everything. I know on one question I totally misread x and y and screwed the problem up. I really wish I could retake it. Anyways, will my BC score overshadow my AB one?</p>
<p>Yes, they will probably think you had a bad day, and pay attention only to your BC score.</p>
<p>In addition to what An0maly said, your 4 is not going to hurt you anyway if you have generally good credentials. I had a 4 on the AB subsection of the BC test (my BC score was, um, lower…our teacher failed, among other things, to actually cover the whole curriculum, and we didn’t know it until we actually took the test). However, I had generally good math credentials, and generally good academic credentials. I got in - apparently they were convinced that I could pass the math GIRs (they were right, too, I had no problem passing 18.01A/18.02A on my first try).</p>
<p>It won’t matter too much. If you get rejected by MIT, it won’t be because you got a 4 on the AB exam- trust me.</p>
<p>Not to mention, AP scores on many college apps, MIT’s included, are self-reported. You need only send in a hard copy if you decide to matriculate. If you’re so worried about it, just don’t report the four. But don’t stress over it too much. I got a four on AB too (I cramped up halfway through the exam and spent about twenty minutes lying on the floor in the bathroom). I agonized for awhile whether or not to report it, ended up putting it down, and I was still accepted.</p>
<p>Just to back up what Jessie said, I only took AB, and got a 3. I graduate from MIT in 10 days, so apparently it wasn’t a big deal. =)</p>
<p>Now, my answer to the OP’s question is “yes” because the BC really does override the AB in general – but if I were an admissions officer and saw anything lower than a 5 on an AP math exam (not that they’re necessarily considered a ton) for math, I’d need rock hard evidence that this student has something else going for them, and that this exam was a complete disaster for whatever reason. And no, good results in math before calculus wouldn’t help, given generally those classes are much easier. There’d have to be some very stellar teacher recommendation describing feats the given student performed in his/her math class which would seriously indicate to me that the calculus thing was a fluke.</p>
<p>On another thread, I mentioned a friend of mine who came to college not ever having taken calculus, and with very elementary knowledge of math, who later came to be realized as a very talented math major, and almost certainly would’ve pulled off straight A’s in very rigorous math coursework at MIT if he went there (to give an idea). But several of us on this MIT board agreed that it’d have been really, really tough to identify his abilities and the likelihood of his success in a rigorous math curriculum. </p>
<p>Obviously I am not an admissions officer, but I find it tough to see it any other way. I know grades matter more than AP scores, but a poor AP score would have me grow skeptical for sure.</p>
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<p>Astoundingly, not everyone comes to MIT to be a math major. By your standards, I wouldn’t have gotten in (my math/science rec was from a science teacher, not a math teacher, so no help there). I had 800s on the SAT math and the SAT II math, but apparently, you put no stock in that.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but this is C-C. It’s not like most people here actually have reasonable standards or expectations or have much of an idea of how admissions actually work. If someone takes advantage of the opportunities that they have (i.e. it’s not counted against you if your school doesn’t offer calculus), and has good math grades and good SAT math and SAT II math scores, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assess them on those grounds.</p>
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<p>Not at all necessarily true – I said I’d be suspicious, not that I’d throw applications indiscriminately in the trash. A 4 on the AP exam would scare me to no end; if it were a legitimate reflection of your abilities, I’d think that’s enough to trash the application. However, I’m easily willing to bet you’re a better mathematical mind somehow or the other than half the people I know who made a 5 on the AP exam, but there would have to have been some other way of making this clear, I assume – the SAT and SAT II absolutely do not count as a redemption factor in my eyes, given calculus is closer to what you’ll need to succeed in college, and doing poorly on it is a red flag. Somehow I doubt MIT would think differently from all this, but hey, you probably know better than I do.</p>
<p>Also, the skills required in calculus probably correspond less closely to the skills needed to handle pure mathematics than they do the skills needed in many science fields which use some modest mathematical machinery. Sure, a recommendation from a physics or chemistry teacher would be nice too, but I’d want doubts cleared up really well.</p>
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<p>Well, from what others, including Mollie, have said, I gather the impression that it’s more about what you do offer MIT than having achieved a mere satisfactory in the opportunities you had sitting there for you. I hope I’m not misrepresenting anything there. It appears for instance Mollie didn’t have calculus in her school, and took the trouble to study it elsewhere. </p>
<p>The people you refer to may not know much about how admissions work, but they seem to make pretty good sense when it comes to assessing how ready someone is to handle rigorous technical curricula. If you disagree with them (including myself – believe me, I respect this guy’s math abilities so much, as is clear from my posts), I’d be very interested to know how you’d propose identifying such a student and still have the heart to admit him to MIT – all completely hypothetical, given he never applied, and is well past that stage, but to take a specially interesting example.</p>
<p>In summary, I don’t think a bad score on any given thing implies trashing an application, just that it can be a glaring warning sign. Is it really even close to disputable that if a 4 were a true reflection of someone’s math abilities, unless they had some ghost “coachability by MIT” factor, they’d get hammered to pieces by MIT coursework?</p>
<p>Dude, basically everyone gets hammered to pieces by MIT coursework.</p>
<p>As previously mentioned, I got a 3 in Calc AB. That might be a little lower than my actual ability, given that I just hated the teacher/class/sort of stopped caring after awhile, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my actual ability level was representative of a 4. And that’s the AB exam, forget BC. Honestly, if you gave me any AP Calc test right now, I’d be surprised if I beat my original score of 3. </p>
<p>Not everyone comes here to be math majors, and this is an important point. I struggled through my math pre-reqs as a frosh, but even MechE uses surprisingly little math. I obviously have to understand the general concepts, but once I get what a derivative or integral <em>is</em> I know which one I need to use in a given situation and plug it into a calculator or computer- because really, it’s rarely a simple polynomial anyway (which is probably the only function I could take a derivative of right now if you asked me.)</p>
<p>In a lot of ways you’re right- obviously there are lots of ways to demonstrate math ability, or an analytical mind, or whatever. But as I have done approximately 3 million times before and will probably continue to do until the day I die, I will take issue with someone suggesting that 4/5 is a “complete disaster,” and must be absolutely refuted by other things before the person in question can even be considered on the same level as an MIT student. Some people here don’t even like math. People here study every type of science, which you yourself admitted uses pretty different skills than “pure mathematics.” Hell, Einstein sucked at math (well, relatively speaking, considering how genius he was otherwise). Math ability, while important, is far from being the be-all and end-all of an intelligent, analytical person who would do well at MIT, or in a science/engineering/technology field in general.</p>
<p>And again, it’s okay to not be perfect sometimes.</p>
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<p>Just as I stated before, I think calculus is an important indicator of where you are for several different disciplines * other than* pure math though – honestly, my friends at Berkeley doing EECS use plenty more calculus than I, a pure math major, do. At most, I run across an abstraction of the notions of calculus elsewhere. But EECS, physics, chemistry, materials science engineering, civil engineering, … all engineering basically – all of these require a thorough background – ask our resident physicist pebbles here, and considerably more mathematical background than a good understanding of calculus is required for success in physics. Most of these friends of mine don’t like the kind of math I study – they cringe when I tell them about it; but nevertheless, I’ve seen their homeworks many times, and have an idea of the skills required. </p>
<p>Certainly it is OK not to be perfect. I think, however, that an 800 on the SAT II Math and a 5 on calculus are far, far from perfection. If one is explicitly talented in an area that absolutely doesn’t require basic mathematics, fine. The reality is, however, most majors, including economics, physics, chem, and all engineering forms require substantial background in it to do much, no?</p>
<p>I must be missing something here because I’m confused, and sorry if I’m being thick.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I think pretty much what is being noted here is that it’s possible to be very good at fields like engineering without having an excellent foundation in introductory college math – I guess it is true that half my engineering friends barely scraped by linear algebra, and didn’t really care for that stuff. </p>
<p>It’s just when my friend in political science who knows zero math or physics managed a 5 on calculus BC and on AP Physics, and my other friend who’s studying Slavic Literature the same (all people who didn’t work their lives away at math, got B’s and everything and have very different passions), I sort of feel like either someone has to be a terrible test-taker or is terrible at math or just doesn’t care at all if they didn’t get a 5 on that AP exam…LIKELY at least – with possible exceptions.</p>
<p>Thanks for all your answers. It’s just that I had a really bad test day. Any other day I would have definitely gotten a 5. Easily. I’ve taken all the practice tests on the site, Barron’s, PR, etc, and can breeze through them no problem. This was my first AP test so I think I sort of overreacted and panicked. Looking back at the FRQ, I made A LOT of careless errors and misread a lot. Like solving for x instead of y because I read the problem incorrectly. That really screwed me up. I don’t think this one test is an accurate representation of my calculus ability, since I have an A+ in that class at a fairly prestigious school.</p>
<p>BTW, I might get a 5 if the curve is generous enough. I destroyed the MC section and bombed the FRQ.</p>
<p>I mean, who says people interested in Slavic Lit can’t also be good at calculus?</p>
<p>I think most science/engineering majors and the actual work involved in those fields require a much less secure grasp of math than you seem to think, but I guess the argument is sort of at a standstill if we just don’t understand each other…</p>
<p>Sure, I don’t deny someone into Slavic Lit could also be good at math. The point of mentioning those two was that people who don’t at all use the math they studied and were far from perfect at math in high school even managed to ace that test.</p>
<p>I think I understand what you’re saying, and have a somewhat different twist to all this. For one thing, you seem to excuse low grades on AP exams on the premise that someone need not be majoring in that exam’s focus in college. I tend to think – hey, it’s calculus, and if I’m even thinking of majoring in any technical field, I probably should get a pretty good feel for it. </p>
<p>What this is coming down to? I think calculus is a pretty fundamental thing. I’m sorry, I guess I’m called “Mathboy” for a reason, and have my views :)</p>
<p>I took AP Biology back in the day, and as it happens I got a 5, but I can see myself having been destroyed on that thing on a bad day, if I just didn’t care enough. </p>
<p>If someone’s application revolved around biology, however, I’d be worried to see less than a 5, because it’s not that hard to get if a guy like me can get it, and I’d want to know what happened at least. </p>
<p>This isn’t to say the biology you learn in AP Bio is necessarily the most important thing for a biology major! Nor is it to say calculus AB/BC are super important for math majors. It is to say that I think all these are very doable endeavors, and if someone literally <em>struggles</em> at the math in AB/BC, I think the level of math-y reasoning used in engineering and science classes probably would overwhelm them and they’d not get as much out of attending MIT as someone else. </p>
<p>In your case Lauran, it may have been you thought the knowledge required in the AP exam was dumb. You may hate multiple choice. You may have for all I know been well versed in much higher mathematics, and just have forgotten all of calculus. The point is, these are all good reasons, and as long as someone isn’t really floundering so much with basic math as to not be able to manage decent scores on tests, and finds it overwhelmingly challenging, I’m happy to consider them alongside everyone else. </p>
<p>Now, all this aside, as a mathematician, I would be very sad if people used techniques and ideas they have little understanding for, and would worry that they’re crunching numbers and learning little 
but that’s another story!</p>
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<p>This is very true. But you can offer MIT other things, other major things, besides being good at calculus. Of course, it never hurts to be good at calculus! But it’s not the only thing out there…all you really need is the capability to <em>pass</em> calculus (at the MIT level, of course). If you don’t have anything to offer beyond the ability to pass the GIRs, then no, you probably won’t get in, but someone who is mediocre at calculus but a whiz at chemistry, for example, or media theory, or has the combination of technical talent and artistic ability needed to be a good architect, is a different case.</p>
<p>My experience was that I found single-variable calculus rough, multi-variable easy, diffeq rough, discrete math fun and relatively easy, linear algebra somewhere in the middle, and prob/stats…hard when I actually took it at MIT, because the class was intended to be very difficult, but easy when I’ve used it in real life. So (as you’ve already conceded, but I felt that it was worth repeating in more detail), math ability is not uniform either.</p>
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<p>It’s also possible that your friends had excellent teachers.</p>
<p>They did. They both went to the same school as I did, and I’ll admit our math curriculum was much more thorough and in depth than the AP exam, and our teachers were ultra-experienced – had the book problem numbers memorized from having taught it so much. I was lucky, and so were my friends. I would still say, however, that it takes very little ability to do well on the calculus exam, much less than it does your linear algebra and discrete math classes at MIT. I know people at my school who got 4’s on the AP exam, despite having fantastic teachers, and sorry, I just don’t think a single one of them realistically would survive MIT – and of course, they’re not attending MIT as it happens. </p>
<p>Part of my problem is I guess that I don’t treat AP math the same as AP science or something – I believe everyone in the world has to have had solid calculus background to get anything done 
– yes I know, how silly I am. And viewing this:</p>
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<p>I imagine that if you really weren’t up to getting a 5 on the AP exam for legitimate reasons (weakness at math, not bad teachers or lack of caring), this would not be very easy. It isn’t at my school, and I’m sure MIT is as hard!</p>
<p>Believe me, I wish I knew how they identified people like you, because I do know some very bright people whose high school records hardly indicate how bright they are (for instance, forget calculus, not even having completed trigonometry), and I’m fascinated by how it’s possible to find them – most people indicated it’s a hard task, and I seem to think so too. How for instance did you convince MIT that it’d be the right place for you? Maybe you know, and maybe you don’t.</p>
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<p>Reading this over, it’s definitely a somewhat uncommon pattern. Most people I know (who are NOT math majors) found single-variable OK, multivariable easy, Diff-EQ possibly even easier, discrete math either a pain or fun depending on teacher and major (EECS majors always liked that class), and linear algebra very much different from what they’d ever done + something they struggled with. </p>
<p>Math majors I know: single-variable they were excellent at and liked it decently, multivariable was the first thing we forgot, Diff-EQ was forgotten before we even learned it ;), liked discrete math and linear algebra a lot.</p>
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<p>Well, I think part of it is that they look at different academic factors, and what the whole picture suggests, rather than getting too focused on any one number. In my case, they may have figured that someone with 800s on the SAT I math and SAT II math IIC, and strong grades and credentials in science and computer science classes (which use math after all) was probably capable of learning basic calculus. Plus, my AB subscore, on the BC test, was much higher than my overall score, suggesting that I was capable of learning calculus and just hadn’t learned anything in the second half of the curriculum for some reason (namely, that our teacher went very slowly and barely got to the second half the curriculum).</p>
<p>Of course, the last paragraph is all about how I convinced MIT that I had enough math ability to get through the GIRs, not how I convinced it that it was the right place for me in general. I had some pretty good credentials and awards, despite coming from a state that is not exactly known for being strong in education and doesn’t send that many people to top schools. I had great recommendations, from teachers who happened to care about the same factors that MIT does. I took what was, at the time, the most rigorous curriculum in the history of my high school, showing that I was ready to be challenged and not the type of person to just coast by. I had ECs that showed a lot of traits that MIT likes to see in applicants.</p>
<p>In the end, though, whichever admissions officer particularly liked my application (there’s frequently a specific one) may have simply done a better job arguing my case to the rest of the committee than some other admissions officer did with some other smart, qualified, personality-compatible-with-MIT kid’s application. That is pretty common, as there are more applicants who are easily academically qualified and would be great fits with MIT, than there are spaces.</p>
<p>Right, for instance – I would probably myself (if trying to decide whether to admit someone) rather they have an algebra-based physics class that’s solid and whose teachers can in depth discuss how awesome the someone was than that they had calculus BC and just did the bare minimum to get an A. I understand why they could pick out that you’re qualified – actually, very strong credentials in computer science definitely would indicate to me possession of the reasoning to survive even higher math classes (at that point it’d depend on the individual’s motivation + inclination). </p>
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<p>Out of curiosity, what are these traits? In high school, I myself will admit that I failed in discovering an out of school interest that truly interested me. Unless you count reading math books. </p>
<p>All said, I think your case (with the computer science, science, etc) was pretty easily resolved – the 4 on an AP exam was clearly no indicator of your abilities. You said it was your bad teacher, and OK, that makes sense. </p>
<p>The reason I ever harped on about the calculus test is that I think there was a large group of people which got A’s in algebra-based physics at my school, got to calculus, decided they didn’t want to complicate the math anymore, essentially gave up on that, and weren’t so hot at calculus-based physics. It’s OK not to want to learn deRham theory + calculus on manifolds, but giving up on basic math like calculus and linear algebra is a bad sign to me. While the math used in engineering isn’t <em>exactly</em> AP calculus stuff, you have to know basic calculus very well, and there’s a lot of basic math intuition. And let’s not even think about physics. And economics at MIT is probably more heavy on basic math prerequisites. I wouldn’t want to see someone “flake out” on basic math just because they like, say chemistry better. It’s a bad attitude I think, and there should’ve been a reason for it in the first place. In your case, ithere was an entirely different (legitimate) reason why things happened as they did.</p>