<p>My guess is that if the course was thorough enough for the students to do well on the AP exam, then they’d call it AP Calculus. They are likely lowering the standards of a “regular” calculus course so at least some can graduate with calculus on their transcripts. If your son is finding the test prep a struggle and doesn’t think he’ll do well, I wouldn’t bother taking the test as he’ll likely need to start with Calc I at college anyway. At least he’s had some exposure to calculus.</p>
<p>There are certain requirements that have to be met to call the course AP. His class may or may not be rigorous, but it has nothing to do with the class title.</p>
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<p>S1 took AP Calc (AB) as a h.s. junior. Made a 4 on exam. Fall of freshman yr. he signed up for Calc. 1 at big state u. thinking he might need a refresher. Had a teacher fr. another country. S1 couldn’t understand what the man was saying and said what he was presenting to them was nothing like the AP Calc. he had in h.s. S1 was doing poorly and was advised to drop the course since he already had AP credit for Calc.1</p>
<p>So he dropped the class and decided to go straight to Calc.II in the spring. Had a good teacher that was happy to help during office hours. S1 went to office hours regularly for help and finished the course w/ a “B”.</p>
<p>ucbalum said ““Never” would likely result in the best students wasting their time and tuition repeating what they already know.”</p>
<p>I agree - never say never and sometimes doing both would waste money… but I think the high school is making the point that AP classes are typically taught by someone with a BA or BS degree while the college equivalent is taught by a Ph.D. + so the depth of material covered is different. The AP Bio test was recently reworked so maybe it’s a different course, but several universities would not accept the old test for credit because it was considered an inch deep and a mile wide and therefore not a true college level equivalent.</p>
<p>It may not be so much whether a course for a high school senior or college frosh is taught by someone with a bachelor’s or doctoral degree, but whether the curriculum is equivalent by design. If a college designs its biology course to have organic chemistry as a prerequisite or corequisite, then the AP course would not be a true equivalent, for example.</p>
<p>For math, a typical AP course would not be equivalent to a proof-oriented or honors course, but most schools do recognize that many of the best-in-math students are ready to move on to more advanced math and would be wasting their time retaking (regular non-honors) calculus 1 (Caltech and Harvey Mudd may be exceptions, but that is because their calculus 1 courses would be considered proof-oriented honors courses everywhere else).</p>
<p>Riporin, yes there are certain requirements to be met in order to call a class an AP class. One of those requirements is that the text must be approved and the syllabus must include what will be covered on the test. If his high school offers other AP classes, I’m guessing that they purposely chose not to make this calculus class an AP course. Ideally his school would offer a choice of this class and an AP one designed to prepare the students for the AP exam.</p>
<p>You really need to look at the college’s calc curriculum. My daughter’s college offers calc in several flavors - basic, for engineers, for bio majors, for economics majors, etc. Each of these series of classes (most go through calc 3 although some stop at calc 2), have different things which they include/leave out. She took both Calc AB (got a 5) and then multivariable (sort of a calc 3) in high school. They only counted the AB credits and she placed into Calc 2 for engineers (she will be majoring in Math/econ). This flavor of Calc 2 almost skipped all the series work of the BC curriculum and spent half the semester doing multi (good for my daughter who has not had the series work.) Had she come in with Calc BC and not multi - she would have placed into Calc 3 and been missing all the multi stuff covered in Calc 2.</p>
<p>Got the curriculum and final exam for Calc I. I’ll show it to my son and see what he thinks. </p>
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