@sbjdorlo You did not miss it - I did not say, other than that it’s the college I attend. Since the site is called College Confidential, I’ve chosen to not say on this site where I go to school (not that’s it’s that hard to figure out). 
The point being, the OP’s daughter should first check that the credits will transfer.
Great thread. Chiming in to say my S had similar experience. Breezed through a not terribly competitive high school. 5s on APs. But high school didn’t offer Calc BC or AP Physics, much less Differential Equations. Definitely underprepared when he got to college. He graduates Penn today and is off to grad school.
@momofsenior1 I would definitely advise skipping Calc 1, although most colleges will have a recommended placement test. Your daughter will need to do research on how the class is taught at the school to see how students are doing.
My son’s school makes the placement test mandatory if the student hasn’t taken Calculus or has gotten less than a 4 on AB/BC. Students who got a 4 or 5 are exempt.
Definitely a good idea to not skip Chemistry, as the General Chemistry classes at most colleges are completely different from how it’s taught in high school.
Some colleges will compress the equivalent AP Chemistry class into 1 semester and use the second course as an introduction to Organic Chemistry. My son’s school (which most CC readers should know) has General Chemistry 1 as focusing more on Physical Chemistry with a major emphasis on orbital and atomic structure-it has been described as baby quantum physics by the instructor. General Chemistry 2 is the class that is more of the AP Chemistry class, but compressed into 1 semester.
Most competitive collleges will give introductory Physics credit only if the student has gotten a 5 on the Physics C Mechanics/Electircity and Magnetism exams. And it’s another class that I don’t think should be skipped for STEM majors.
I would try to use AP math credits to get ahead, especially if the college in question does a poor job in teaching introductory math classes, but still take the introductory science classss as they are the foundation classes for STEM majors
Thank you for your reply and input @Hamurtle! She’s going to take a bunch of the calc tests and decide if she’s scoring high enough to skip. She doesn’t meet with her advisor until July so she’ll have plenty of time. At first glance, it looked easier than what she is doing now in high school. I think calc I will be a definitely and then she’ll need to decide if she can also skip II. (She does not need to take the math placement because she scored high enough on the ACT and is projected to get a 5 on the AP test.)
Actually, if a student is in an engineering major that only requires a semester of general chemistry, does not need that general chemistry as an important prerequisite for some other required course (e.g. organic chemistry), and has AP chemistry credit that is allowed in place of it, it can be a good idea to skip it.
In general, if a student with AP credit for a course is trying to decide whether to skip the course, and needs the course as a prerequisite for later courses, trying the old final exams of the course can be used to check his/her knowledge of the subject material by the college’s standards.
The need to grade-grub to get into the major can be a drawback to the first year college experience. However, if the school is Minnesota (which has a 3.2 minimum GPA for assured admission to the major), note that only biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and mechanical engineering appear to be filled to capacity, and other engineering majors admitted down to 2.0: https://www.advising.cse.umn.edu/cgi-bin/courses/noauth/apply-major-statistics
Not Minnesota, Purdue, but it’s very similar in terms of GPA requirements. That said the engineering students we all talked to said that the 3.2 is very doable. I’ll report back next year!
Purdue is less transparent on its web site than Minnesota about what majors are more or less competitive. You may have to ask directly what the historical GPA thresholds for various majors are. If they won’t say, then that means that the first year engineering experience there will be a competitive grade-grubbing one for any major.
Obviously, if you asked students still in engineering majors, they are the ones who met the GPA requirements, rather than those who got weeded out by them.
Good point @ucbalumnus. My feeling though is that if my daughter can’t meet a 3.2 in intro classes, she’s picked the wrong academic path. Purdue has actually been very upfront with major thresholds on live chats with parents and students, and in person, but you are right, they don’t publish the thresholds for FYE (first year eng), only for transfer students. The yield rate from FYE to transition to major is actually surprisingly high. The dean of eng. said the “weed out” already happened during the admissions process to the college of engineering. We’ll see!
3.2 in college is harder to earn than 3.2 in high school.
A lot of the kids at the Ivies think it is easier than high school. Most of the kids have no desire to get a 4.0. It does not matter unless your grades are really sub par. The graduate schools are more concerned with what classes you took and your research skills. Industry for internships and jobs are also most concerned with what classes you took. This may not be true for future med school students.
My kid had about a 3.65 in college and it appears to have no bearing on grad school admissions or internships for them.
Also some professors at the Ivies grade hard because they can. Some grade easy. At Harvard they have the Q guide to help the students know what they are getting into before they take the class.
Regular smart kids will meet talented and super talented kids at some schools and realize they were not as smart as they were hard workers.
Some industries, like IB, require 3.5 GPA. To get into a top 14 law school one needs 3.8+ GPA.
You don’t need math or physics for IB or law school though. That helps with the GPA. I’m not sure a law school would see an engineering 3.5 and LSAT 170 as worse than English 3.8 LSAT 170…
I don’t mind the curve bit, but someone should tell kids this before they go: start at a lower level than you think you are ready for, and be ready to see what you think is a failing grade. But remember the curve is your friend. My S1 was over placed by a counselor and withdrew. A friends daughter freaked during her first exam and shut down. (Both third level Calc and both Mich).
If they knew it was coming, that would help.
re #91:
"To get into a top 14 law school one needs 3.8+ GPA. "
That was not necessarily the case 3-4 years ago.
At that time, if one’s LSATs were high enough, (and hopefully other credentials were considered and evaluated positively) it was possible to be admitted to most of the T14s with a lower GPA than this… FWIW.
GPA still had to be high though, which I guess is more the point.
One thing that I find interesting is the number of students that end up retaking Calc I or II even though they’ve received 4’s or 5’s on the AP exam (or equivalent DE, IB, etc). At a South Carolina admitted students day, the Dean of the College of Engineering recommended that students not retake these courses. His argument was that “Calculus is hard, no matter how many times you take it”. He said that there’s a real risk of students getting bored if the material appears to be review and not preparing adequately for the exams. I’m sure that some of this comes into play.
I’m fine with curves and making tests hard. I think it helps break out students that are able to quickly work through challenging questions without unduly punishing students that can’t get through the problems as quickly or as naturally. I do have a problem with exam material being more difficult than problems presented within the class textbooks and supplemental materials. To me, the more challenging problems should be presented within these formats so that students can actually work through the material as a learning exercise rather than as an evaluation exercise. Teach the approaches to solving challenging problems before you put them on an exam.
There are so many students with 4.4 GPAs that have never seen hard coursework before college. High schools are spoon feeding material exactly like that which is on the tests.
Our HS takes a “problem solving” approach which means you get the tools through your homework but must apply them to solve problems on the test. My son has a B+ in Math and near perfect Math SAT score. I’m worried about whether colleges will understand that his HS courses were rigorous, but I am not worried about his preparation for college work.
I think part of the difficulty with college courses is that many students are accustomed to an algorithmic approach to STEM in high school. They are shown problems from a category, shown how to solve them, and then asked to solve a problem from that category on an exam.
An indicator that a student is taking this approach are the questions: “How do you solve this type of problem?” or “What equation do you use for this problem?”
University STEM courses are not taught like that. Part of the reason is that it is not possible to practice every type of problem that a scientist or engineer will encounter in the future. Better questions would be “How do you think about this problem?” or “What concepts are used to solve this problem?”
University science courses tend not to have “the material.” They have ideas and connections between properties/phenomena. So the exams can’t test"the material." What they need to test is the application of the ideas that the students have been seeing, to problems they have not seen before. This is what makes a scientist, after all.
I almost never put a problem of a specific type that the students have seen before on my exams. Having said that, the averages on my exams are usually high 70’s or just touching 80, with an 85 needed for an A. In my opinion, this probably maximizes the work that the students put into the course, and maximizes learning. Lower averages are okay, but I think that a really low average tends to discourage students from trying. I took an organic chemistry class once where one midterm had a median of 23 and a mode of 4.
The British system is different. I think Twoin18 has explained the scoring for various types of honors degrees in math in the UK. In Cambridge mathematics at one time, it was not uncommon for the Senior Wrangler (the top-scoring student on the exams at the end of three years) to have a score that was ten times the score of the student at the far end of the first-class honors degrees (let alone those who got other levels of honors). There was also the general legend that the student who came in second would have a more distinguished career, on the theory that the Senior Wrangler had nothing left to prove, while the person who came second did.
One of my favorite Cambridge math stories is about Philippa Fawcet, who took the math Tripos when women were not allowed to get Cambridge degrees. The practice was to announce all of the men’s results in public (to an assembled group of students), and then for the few women who had taken the exam, to say which men they scored between. In Philippa’s case, the announcement started out “Above,” and the rest of the words, “the Senior Wrangler,” were drowned out in the noise from the crowd.
Not true. GPA is only 50% of the requirement; LSAT is the other half. For example, 3.8 is the median at U-Michigan. In other words, half the students are below a 3.8. In fact, Michigan’s bottom quartile is 3.57.
Comparable numbers for NYU is 3.83 and 3.66, respectively. Georgetown = 3.79 median, 3.52 bottom quartile.
My non-ivy S20’s recommendation is “unless you got an easy 5 on the CalcBC AP, start in Calc2 not MultiVar”. BTW, He is an undergrad TA for Calc 2 (Math and CS major) and sees a lot of engineering majors fail or have low grades by the mid-term.
My S22 is taking BC tomorrow and is not even studying because he will easily get a 5. The curve for a 5 is pretty generous which is why my older one says to repeat Calc 2.
It seems to be a common viewpoint on these forums that students with AP credit should always repeat their AP credit, even though that will be a waste of time and tuition for many. (But it may be even more common among pre-meds trying to grade-grub A grades by repeating something that they know.)
Agree, though an incoming frosh probably wants to try the college’s old final exams for the courses that may be skipped before jumping into the next course that depends on the courses to be skipped as prerequisites.