I’m a junior in highschool and I can’t decide whether to take pre-calc like the rest of the juniors or take AP Stats. From what I’ve heard pre-calc/calc is really only needed for STEM majors and I’m leaning more towards AP Statistics because you analyze and solve problems through reasoning and I think that would be more useful, but I’m not sure. Please help!
It is still early to be choosing your college major. It may be better to get to at least precalculus in high school, in case you later decide to choose a major that requires calculus (e.g. business or economics), or your college requires calculus for some other reason.
If you are aiming for the most selective colleges, they are more likely to be impressed by precalculus and calculus in terms of course rigor than if you cut math off before precalculus, even if you take statistics as an elective.
Honestly, if you’re not a STEM kind of kid, Precalc is likely to be far easier than AP Stat. Statistics, surprisingly enough, can be a brutally hard course-- nothing like the “mean, median, mode, standard deviation” stuff you’ve already seen.
Pre Calc is a good starting place for anyone considering moving on to college, regardless of major.
The head of our school’s math departments says that most of his math oriented students will say that AP Statistics is harder than AP calculus. He told my son to not take AP Stats after math analysis (that’s what we call our pre-calc). He is also a non-stem major. He stopped at math analysis and is taking AP Physics (there is a lot of upper level math in this course) instead of a math course his senior year as he already had 4 math credits (Geometry, Algebra 2, Trigonometry & Math Analysis). At our school we also have dual credit college algebra, if your school has that option it might be worth investigating.
Precalc is a good idea, in case you need to do business calculus in college. You don’t need high school calculus, though.
Stats can be easy or hard, depends on how it is taught. Both of my kids had no problem with stats and one is an artist and one is STEM.
Is stats really “harder,” or just a different way of viewing issues than the usual math track?
As usual, we have no idea what colleges this new poster is considering. Change the idea of communications, decide to aim high, and precalc is the better choice, yes.
But nor do we know what tier her grades, rigor, scores, ECs qualify her for.