So I am an upcoming junior and I was wondering if my schedule is “rigorous”. My school has a block schedule, so I will show the schedule of both semesters.
1st Semester
- Advanced Topics in Mathematics
- US Government and Economics with Financial Literacy Honors(all one class)
- Info Tech (I go to a collegiate high school, so we have techs… also this would be an “AP”)
- Info Tech
2nd Semester
- US History Honors
- Anatomy & Physiology Honors
- Info Tech
- Info Tech
Along with these classes I will be dual enrolling at a community college, each semester taking four classes. My issue is, I do not feel like my schedule is “rigorous”. First of all, I am currently doing US Government at my community college, so I am going to be taking government twice, and I was planning on taking AP Macroeconomics, but I was put in the school’s gov & econ class (school does not offer AP Macro), so my plan was to dual enroll Gov, take AP Macro online, and have a free class slot to take an AP at school because those two classes would replace Gov and Econ at school, but now that free spot is not available. To also add, I was put in Advanced Topics, but my school offers pre-calc honors, which seems to me to be a more difficult class than Advanced Topics, but I was planning on taking college algebra, statistical methods, and calculus for business and social sciences at community college, so I dont know if those compensate for taking Advanced Topics instead of pre-calc. Also, my school offers AP Bio, so I dont know if taking Anatomy instead shows that I was trying to avoid AP Bio, which would show that I did not want a rigorous schedule. Should I just keep this schedule, or find a way to change it so that it will be more rigorous? I might just be completely overreacting, but I wouldnt want a schedule that couldve been more rigorous and appealing to colleges.
Feel free to ask any questions, because this is kind of confusing lol but thank you!
You can’t do well in calc without taking precal or learning the material
^ precalc didn’t help me much for Calc. It was all new material anyways except for the unit circle.
@GaindalfTheWhey @agentaquastar should it be a class I should take then or it doesnt matter?
It’s still a good class to take and I’m surprised they’ll let you take Calc without it. But if you can skip it and want to get ahead, you should be able to handle Calc without it.
@agentaquastar In my community college, the calc class only requires college algebra as a pre req, which I will be taking, but I agree that it is weird that pre calc is not a pre req. But I just wanted to make sure that I am not hurting myself by not taking pre calc this year, because I am not looking into taking it senior year.
Hmm I think taking precalc and then Calc is a good route and would look rigorous enough. Why do you want to skip precalc exactly? CC classes do look rigorous for a high school student, so either route will look “good” for colleges. But if you don’t need to skip precalc, I don’t see why you should…? Taking precalc will only help.
@batman0309 I think that the risk of your overreaching and getting bad grades are higher than the risk of your taking an insufficiently rigorous schedule. As one example, I am pretty sure that there was a thread on CC a while back from a student who took calculus without first taking pre-calculus, and doing badly.
I will admit that as a former math major, I have no idea what “Advanced Topics in Mathematics” means in the context of your school, and therefore can’t tell whether this will prepare you for Calculus or anything else.
I also wonder whether you might potentially be interested in Mathematics, Engineering, Technology, or Physics as a major. If so, then I suspect that "calculus for business and social sciences " will turn out to be the wrong version of calculus.
“I might just be completely overreacting, but I wouldnt want a schedule that couldve been more rigorous and appealing to colleges.”
A’s and A+'s in a pretty strong schedule is much better than B’s and C’s in an extremely rigorous schedule.
@DadTwoGirls I cannot say either what Advanced Topics in Math covers, but I searched it up and another school that has it says that it covers the topics followed: Polynomials & Rational Expressions, Complex numbers, Relations & Functions, Exponential & Logarithmic Functions, Circles, Trig, Probability & Stats, Sequences & Series, and Matrices, but I cannot guarantee that my school is the same way.
But, I am going into a social sciences major (International Relations/Political Science), so I thought Calculus for Business and Social Sciences would be my best bet, considering the fact that the other Calculus classes have too many pre reqs that I dont think I will have the time to do. But yes you are definitely right, As in a strong schedule is better than lower grades in a too strong schedule. I just want to make sure I am identifying the “rigorous schedule” in my school correctly, because colleges always look for the most rigorous schedule possible.
@agentaquastar It’s that I am not looking to skip pre calc; I was put into that Advanced Topics class by my counselor without me knowing. The original plan was to have my fourth math for my high school requirements to be College Algebra at CC, so I would not even have to take any math at school, but since I was put in a math anyways, I wanted to know whether this Advanced Topics class or Pre Calculus would be a better fit for a rigorous schedule. I do not want my taking Advanced Topics to seem to colleges that I was avoiding a possibly more difficult math class, so I am wondering which math class is exactly “more difficult”, which would be the class I would want to take.
@batman0309 Based on your post #8, Advanced topics in math sounds quite interesting to me. The amount of area that it covers suggests that it probably does not go into enough depth in any area to be considered an adequate prerequisite for other classes (such as Calculus), but covering this wide a range of what I would call interesting subjects is probably very worthwhile. For example it will give you a hint regarding some of the topics that exist in math.
^ agree with above. Advanced topics sounds like a mix of algebra 2 and analysis/precalc. I think it will be enough to prepare you for calc. And again, any CC class is pretty rigorous for a high schooler. All competitive colleges just want to see that you’ve taken up to calculus and have good grades in those classes.
@DadTwoGirls @agentaquastar alright thank you guys! Just wanted to make sure I was taking the right path for college admissions. Especially how I didn’t take an AP that a lot of my class took, I feel like I really need to compensate for that so my transcript looks just as rigorous without that class as theirs does with it.