<p>My school's general, unspoken, rule of thumb is that the math progression is (Algebra)-->Geometry-->Algebra II-->Precalculus-->AP Calc/Stats. Is it really necessary to take Precalc before AP Stats, or is that just my school?</p>
<p>Same here. Taking Precalc isn’t really necessary for either AP class (and certainly doesn’t help at all for statistics).</p>
<p>my school lets you choose which course you want to do after alg. II (AP stats or precalculus)</p>
<p>Here I don’t believe they’ll let you skip. </p>
<p>Hmmm… I always thought that was odd, and now I do even more. I’m taking precalc over summer, so if I wanted I guess I could do both AP Calc and Stats, but that doesn’t sound too great to me.</p>
<p>my school its either stats or precal —> calc or stats</p>
<p>My school only lets you skip “Math Analysis” if you’re really good at math and request it. Calculus and Statistics are very different (AP Stat is barely like math) so it wouldn’t be that bad.</p>
<p>What is Math Analysis? Isn’t that like precalc? haha… that is what it is at my friends IB school, idk.</p>
<p>We have math analysis too. For us it’s as basic as they can teach precalc.</p>
<p>ap stats is less important than precalc,
so i guess it makes sense that you would take it later
but it’s not really necessary</p>
<p>For us honors students its</p>
<p>Freshman: ALG 2/Trig
Sophomore: Precalc
Junior: AP Calc BC or AP Calc AB
Senior: Advanced Calc or AP Statistics </p>
<p>For normal people its</p>
<p>Freshman : Geometry
Sophomore: Alg 2/Trig
Junior : Precalc
Senior: AP Calc BC or AP Calc AB</p>
<p>For somewhat inferior people.</p>
<p>Freshman: Geometry
Sophomore: ALG 2
Junior: Trig
Senior: Precalc</p>
<p>For stupid people</p>
<p>Freshman: ALG 1
Sophomore: Geometry
Junior: ALG 2
Senior: TRig</p>
<p>For failures</p>
<p>Freshman: Geometry
Sophomore: Integrated 1
Junior: Integrated 2
Senior Integrated 3</p>
<p>The progression from Algebra II is either Precalculus (for the smarter kids) or AFM (Adv. Fxns and Modeling, for the ones who perhaps aren’t the brightest lightbulb in the box). Precalculus leads into Calculus/IB Math and AFM leads into ICM (Intro to College Math).</p>
<p>Statistics is entirely separate from the progression; most of the smart kids take it sophomore year but it’s open to 10-12.</p>
<p>Does precalc actually serve a purpose for calculus? At our school, we spend half a year on random topics like polar graphs and matrices, then start calculus after midterms.</p>
<p>^ Yes, but not directly. Precalc gives you a broad mathematical knowledge base and heightens your math skills which you will need for the calculus class. Also if you do any math in college a lot of the precalc topic will be extremely useful especially Matrices…</p>
<p>yea, you have to know some of the identities in order to do certain integrals</p>
<p>(think sin^2 + cos^2 = 1, 1 + tan^2 = sec^2, sin^2 A = [1 - cos(2A)]/2…)
don’t pass them off as things you’re allowed to forget when you’re done with the class</p>
<p>it’s also EXTREMELY useful for physics</p>
<p>Precalculus actually doesn’t cover any calculus at all (unless the curriculum includes limits and basic derivatives, like ours did). But the topics taught in precalculus form the basis for everything you need to do in calculus; without it you’ll struggle in calculus.</p>
<p>One guy in my school somehow got to skip straight from Algebra 2 AA to Calculus AB in 10th grade. I have no idea how he got the school to let him do that, but he’s really quite a smart guy.
But everyone else takes Pre-Cal (unless they’re not going to do calc). Most of it is pretty useless for calc, but you become more solid with radians and you learn a few more trig identities than you did in Algebra 2.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Eh, not really. All I learned was trig definitions (like sin/cos = tan), basic derivatives and basic antiderivatives. I took Calc AB online, and it wasn’t particularly difficult. I also ended up studying the rest of the material for BC in the 10 days before the test and got a 5. I assume precalc is generally spent learning stuff like polar coordinates, vectors and trig, but the first two can be learned very quickly. You don’t need much trig to do well in calculus either, though I do wish I knew more than just sin^2 + cos^2 = 1.</p>
<p>^I learned a lot more trig than that in Math B, and my school still require pre-calc before calc.</p>
<p>Accelerated Kids:
Math A/B
Math B
Pre-Calc
Calc AB or BC</p>
<p>Normal Kids:
Math A
Math A/B
Math B
Pre-Calc</p>
<p>Slow Kids:
Math A
Math A/B
Math B
Math B</p>