<p>At my school, AP Stats is considerably more difficult than AP Calculus - people who have taken both agree that Stats is "less mathy" but a lot more enigmatic which makes it confusing. People call Stats "magic" since they're just plugging-in values into the calculator and really have no grasp as to what it is they're doing, while in Calculus, they actually understand the concepts behind the problems they're solving.</p>
<p>Most people get 4/5 in Calculus and a 2/3 on Stats when taken in conjunction or when Stats is taken before Calc.</p>
<p>I self-studied AP Calculus BC and AP Stats. I got a 4 on Calculus BC and a 3 on Stats. I thought Stats was boring, so I studied it a lot less. </p>
<p>(IMO, high school calculus is dumbed down in ways that stats isn’t because they assume you’ll find calculus hard because it’s calculus. But people take stats with the idea that it will be easy, so they raise the bar and try to make it challenging.)</p>
<p>Btw, what do you mean by “less mathy”?</p>
<p>Yes. Cal bc isn’t hard even. If you get 30% of the questions this a 3</p>
<p>Stats requires more writing and language-based analysis, supposedly, making it less “mathy.” (I wouldn’t know personally, I’m only in Calc.)</p>
<p>^ Definitely agree. I signed up for stats thinking that it would be way more “mathy” than what I’m currently learning in that class. My advice to all you math/science people who don’t like English and are considering stats - don’t. In my opinion, AP Stats barely qualifies as math (more like applied math), although it’s probably really different in the real world.</p>
<p>More advanced math (so I’m told) is more about writing/proving stuff than it is about computation/numerals.
(Statistics isn’t really a branch of math in the way that, say, algebra is. It’s more of an applied math field, or a science that uses a lot of math.)</p>