Is it okay not to take Calculus senior year?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

I’m not sure where to ask this question, but this seems as good a place as any, so here it is.
Is it okay for me not to take Calculus my senior year? I’m a high school junior and as I look over my schedule for next year, I’m getting very worried. I get good grades (all A’s with B’s in math), and I have always favored the humanities over math and science. Everybody says that to get into good colleges, Calculus is a must, but my school only offers AP Calculus, and I can’t handle 5 APs in one year (my school has year-round classes). I’m not aiming for Harvard or anything, but I do plan on applying to some fairly competitive state schools.
Right now my tentative schedule looks like this:

AP Bio
AP Spanish Lang
AP English Lit
AP US Government
math of some sort? statistics (non AP)
Advanced Latin (I’m already taking the AP offering so this is like independent study)

I don’t like math. I don’t want to study a math or science based major in college. I feel like taking a regular level statistics class is fine for what I want to do, but I’m worried it’ll ruin my chances at a good college.

2

@mauvepen I feel like you should be fine taking statistics instead of AP Calculus. You already have four AP’s and you are not expected to take every AP you could possibly take. On the other side (I’m a math major), I didn’t take AP Bio or APUSH/APWH for many reasons, even though I could have.

However, if you did well and really understand things taught in algebra and pre-calculus, you probably won’t find calculus too difficult. Furthermore, knowing calculus has helped me understand some topics in statistics. But if you would rather take statistics, then by all means, do so.

3

Advanced Latin (post AP) would easily “offset” not taking calculus, especially for a future Humanities major. Top colleges want to see precalculus but even at Harvard there’s a sizable number of admitted students who never took any form of calculus (although, granted, this year it was only 15%, last year it was 30%.) Since that’s not what you’re aiming for and you’d be taking a 4th year math class along with a rigorous schedule, it should be perfectly fine. :slight_smile: