<p>AP Calculus AB is extremely easy. You have a year to do one semester of college work. If you’re complaining about that, you’ll do 2x as much work PER CLASS when you’re in college. Don’t let the “AP” sticker fool you; if you actually study and pace yourself, getting under an A in that class would make you look stupid.</p>
<p>BC is harder. It’s about the difficulty of a high school Literature course. Not even that bad, especially if you’re good at math.</p>
<p>The problem is that you’re trying to introduce applied Calculus into a system in which most of the subjects don’t fully understand Calculus yet. I understand how plugging and chugging is a failure on the part of the US educational system, but how would you begin to teach students how to apply a concept that they know nothing about? For many (if not most) high school students, all they can possibly fathom (especially in their senior year - you have to be mindful; most seniors DON’T dream of getting into MIT/Harvard/Yale and therefore don’t care about senior year classes) is learning what a derivative is and evaluating it at certain points. Why do you think most HS math textbooks only ask questions such as “Evaluate the derivatives of the given functions?” To be frank, I know people that wouldn’t know how to do that unless they receive extensive tutoring.</p>
<p>Sure, I agree with the notion that proof-based Calculus would be a huge benefit. However, I would also conjecture that it would be a futile exercise to introduce proof based Calculus until one has already completed a corresponding Calculus course that covered the necessary material. I’m actually enrolled in Calculus I for the summer and the professor taught us how to do epsilon delta proofs about a week ago. There are 15 people in this class. Only about 3 understood what he was saying after numerous explanations, and these are college students. </p>
<p>You have to understand that you plan to major in math, and thus, have already completed extensive math courses/programs in your HS career. Many others that take classes like AP Calculus AB/BC don’t want to major in math and thus, don’t care as much.</p>
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Yes, because the majority of people taking AP Calculus will CARE about a car that travels at a trivial velocity and want to know its resulting acceleration.</p>
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Prestige? I assure you, no one around here really cares if they take AP Calculus. AP Calc tends to be a course that people take because they actually care about math - not because they want the prestige of taking such a course.</p>
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Okay? So it isn’t okay for people to be bad at math if they don’t plan to do anything with it in the future? Sure, I would vouch for a competency in mathematics, but if someone wanted to major in [insert Humanities area here], then exactly why would they really care? You scoff at people that take AP [Humanities] because it doesn’t offer as wide of breadth of application as math does, but does it really matter? If one majored in Musical Performance/Theory, they would most likely never need to perform applied calculus to figure out why a iii chord is undesirable in SATB writing or why a violin’s strings vibrate the way they do.</p>
<p>Lots of seriously elitist people here. I wonder how many of them have even seen how difficult calculus tests administered at the average (not the likes of MIT/Caltech/etc.) college are (hint - most are much more “plug and chug” than AP problems), or even tried teaching those students that get average grades in those “easy joke” AP Calculus classes.
Here are some random examples I found through google:
<a href=“http://www.ms.uky.edu/~corso/teaching/math113/practice-midt2.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ms.uky.edu/~corso/teaching/math113/practice-midt2.pdf</a>
<a href=“http://math.colorado.edu/~mcgregoz/FinalExamReview.pdf[/url]”>http://math.colorado.edu/~mcgregoz/FinalExamReview.pdf</a>
<a href=“http://math.tntech.edu/~sleborne/MATH1910/final.pdf[/url]”>http://math.tntech.edu/~sleborne/MATH1910/final.pdf</a></p>
<p>High school calculus is a pathetically easy bunch of repetitive exercises. AB is trivial - in fact it’s easier than the honors precalc course at my school. BC isn’t much better, as (for example) 43% of the people taking it got a 5 in 2009. </p>
<p>What’s even more strange is that college-level calculus classes often cover the epsilon-delta definition of limit, proof of the Mean Value Theorem, etc. while usually having weaker students than what one encounters in a typical AP class.</p>
<p>BC students get a lot of 5 scores because BC students tend to be self-selecting as the best students in math (the advanced but not as strong-in-math students choose AB, or an even less rigorous non-AP calculus course).</p>