<p>No one, and I repeat no one, from my school has PASSED the ap calc ab test within the past seven years; that means no one has even gotten a 3. I go to a public school, about 1000 people, and the typical total number of ap calc takers is about 25-30.</p>
<p>I have the class next semester...I really want to do well on the test, and I see many of you feel that it is entirely too easy. Do you have any suggestions for self-teaching books? I was thinking of getting Calculus Made Easy. </p>
<p>As you can tell, we have a crappy teacher...my pre-calc teacher went on maternity leave after I was in the class for one week last year, and we had a sub who read the Clique books to herself for the remainder of the year; thus, I don't feel prepared.</p>
<p>Might I mention, I was the first person in 5 years to score a 5 on the ap lang and comp test from my school...so, is my school really that bad?</p>
<p>Yes, your school is really that bad - chances are that the teachers, starting from algebra and going up through precalculus, have been rather incompetent. The concepts of calculus are pretty easy to understand. 99% of calculus mistakes are because of algebra or trig errors. Chances are that without understanding algebra or trigonometry, students are having an incredibly difficult time performing well on the AP Calc exams.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s possible that the calc teacher at your school is incompetent and does not understand the exam rigor. The exam is designed to throw in tricks that many students will not be able to forsee and solve without having prior experience. Also, your teacher may commit a cardinal sin like not assigning homework (seriously, a precalc teacher at my school assigns no homework) or not finishing the curriculum.</p>
<p>Finally, it may be possible that the students in your school are extremely unmotivated. There are many calculus tutorial videos available on the Internet, and a motivated student should be able to teach himself the subject, even without a competent teacher. This is why you will be the first student in seven years to pass the AP Calculus AB exam - you seem motivated and bright.</p>
<p>Honestly, I learned straight from the Larson/Hostetler/Edwards textbook. KhanAcademy on YouTube has many solid tutorial videos that help clear up discrepancies.</p>
<p>Yup, school is bad. If you’re motivated and bright like what Keasbey Nights said, then you’re more likely to get a passing score than anyone else in your school Follow Keasbey Nights suggestion since the Larson textbook also prepared me well for the AP Calculus AB exam (but I did not use youtube video since it’s not my way of learning). PR is most recommended study guide for AP Calculus.</p>
<p>Haha, every AP class in my public school is like that. Just read advice on CC and teach yourself. That’s what I did, and I’m at seven 5’s and two 4’s so far, with hopefully ten more 5’s coming this year.</p>
<p>If you try, you can do well on the AP Calc test. It is bad that your school has not had someone pass in the last 7 years. Well, not just bad, but really really bad. It probably is the teachers. I recommend using Princeton Review (Also peterson’s “master the AP Calculus exam” is not bad). Good luck with it, I’m sure you can make school history by passing.</p>
<p>Well one problem I see with your school is that the course is taken in a semester. Some schools may be able to do that fine, but I think your school should stretch it to a year (unless you don’t think your teacher could help by having more time to explain concepts). If it was a full year, the teacher could spend about a month on each chapter to grasp everything.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for the encouragement. I guess CC is where people like me come to get encouragement from other motivated people. It surely worked. :)</p>
<p>MrWheezy, thanks A LOT for those sites! I’m going to order the Princeton book and use these along with it.</p>
<p>I’m sure the semester has a large role to play as well, but this is only our second year on the schedule; ap chemistry and ap ush are the only two year-long classes.</p>
<p>When I first started teaching, I taught at a school where no one had passed the exam in years (more than all of you have mentioned so far). To make matters worse, not a single student had scored a 2 in a dozen years. They asked me to teach the course, mostly because no one else in the building wanted to do it, and they figured I would remember it, fresh out of college.</p>
<p>There were a number of things about that school that contributed to those results:</p>
<p>(1) I frankly had no idea what I was doing, and no one could even point me to any information regarding what was on the AP Calculus exam. They handed me a textbook and said go to it. This was before audits were around, before I knew of AP workshops, and before the internet was largely in vogue for exchanging this kind of information. Accordingly, I mostly tried to teach at the pace my students could handle through as many of the beginning chapters as we could get through.</p>
<p>(2) The courses leading into AP Calculus simply did not prepare students for the later courses. One of the major issues that we had was that our Algebra I and Geometry courses were ridiculously watered down. We had maybe half our school passing Algebra I even with the watered down standards, and we were desperately trying to get those numbers up. One of the side effects of this was that some students who worked decently hard were convinced that they were brilliant math students, and those students were needed to keep the more advanced classes running. Their lack of background hurt some in Algebra 2 and Pre-calc, and those classes were watered down a bit in order to help keep those classes running.</p>
<p>(3) Due to the economic constraints of our environment, maybe a half dozen of the 19 or so kids who would take the class would own a graphing calculator, and the building only had a dozen or so calculators for the entire school to loan out. Some of the kids would take the AP exam without the calculator, and it certainly wasn’t a regular part of instruction.</p>
<p>Definitely the internet has made self-studying for AP Calculus a lot easier than in the past, and it’s certainly made a complement to your studies a lot easier as well. But I think that school was an indicator of the kind of systemic failure that many of our schools across the nation are suffering under.</p>
<p>You can most certainly self-study the AP Exam and do well. </p>
<p>Wow, your school sounds terrible. Mediocre instruction in alg/geo/precal could be detrimental, so you might want to brush up on those before going on to calculus. What trips many people in calculus, and especially the AP, are not necessarily calculus mistakes, they are algebra mistakes. If your school really is that bad (sounds bad), I’m wondering what kind of instruction and training you got in the previous math courses. </p>
<p>MathProf- How many years have you been teaching and have you been successful in helping kids pass AP Calc?</p>
<p>I’ve been teaching awhile, and the good news is that at my current school, we’ve done a lot better at preparing students for the AP Exam. A lot of that is due to the preparation that kids have had in courses prior to taking mine, but a lot of that is also due to the framework that I set up five years back that sets up a rather detailed plan for how to get kids from Point A to Point B. We had a few more struggles last year than most, and I think that’s in large part because our school is starting to fail in terms of getting kids to Point A in the first place.</p>
Furthermore, if you need an AP Calculus textbook Thomas/Finney 9e or if you don’t want to pay [url=<a href=“