<p>I'm a rising sophomore and I'm taking IB Math SL Yr. 1, which is Pre-Calculus.</p>
<p>I'm just wondering if Pre-Calc is hard in any way?</p>
<p>That’s a pretty broad question. A lot of people find it hard and a lot of other people don’t.</p>
<p>I don’t think it was that bad. I took the final without taking the class, so I don’t know about the workload. I thought the hardest part was getting an intuition for trigonometry and the unit circle. Other people think trig is easy.</p>
<p>I hated that freaking class. Like Halcyonheather said, some found this class really easy and some just couldn’t do it (me). Trigonometry sucked because I couldn’t get it to stick in my head to save my life. To be completely honest, I think you’ll have no problem with it. You’re a sophomore taking that class, I was a junior. I think you’re fine.</p>
<p>Depends on the teacher and if you are good at math</p>
<p>For me Pre-Cal was easy because it was like Alg 2 but twice as hard.
But all classes vary depending on school and person. If you’re a math person, should be easy. If you’re not, good luck.</p>
<p>depends on your math aptitude. i recommend previewing it before taking the course, since some stuff if you haven’t seen before(aka trig) can be a bit confusing.</p>
<p>I’m by no means a math person and up until Pre-Cal, I was awful at math. (Algebra II was the death of me.) However, I found Trig and Pre-Cal really interesting and pretty easy to grasp, at least easier than Alg II. There hadn’t been a single test all year that I scored less than an 80 on, and that’s really saying something for me. (I know some kids must be reading this, disgusted. “An 80? Bleh!”) </p>
<p>But yeah. Pre-Cal is fun. If you memorize the Unit Circle (and there are a few tricks to help online), you’ve basically mastered about 50% of trig. The rest is just application and calculator work.</p>
<p>Also, if you memorize the first quadrant of the unit circle, you can derive the rest.</p>
<p>Bull, I can’t remember the stupid circle and yet I have a photographic memory (too much angles and radians).</p>
<p>I found Pre-Calc extremely easy, even though I failed it for a quarter (I was working until close at Kohl’s which therefore reduced my studying and even resting time).</p>
<p>When everybody mentions trigonometry, is it the sine, cosine, tangent we learned in geometry?</p>
<p>Yes. It is. But it’s way more than just that imo</p>
<p>@Foodlover001 - yes, but a much wider, deeper application of sin/cos/tan, including inverses, graphing, etc.</p>
<p>For me, it was a pain in the butt. I got an A both semesters, but I had to work my butt off to earn those A’s. Trig is by far the most painful part of this class.</p>
<p>Precalc is so easy. People overthink Precalc. That’s why people think it is so hard.</p>
<p>I’m pretty good at Math. For the last week and a half(?) of school, we started going over some Pre-Calc stuff, like radians. I had memorized the Unit Circle, but I already forgot it. :P</p>
<p>I’ve also heard that a good portion of it goes over stuff from Algebra 2, like Descuff said.</p>
<p>It does at the beginning. Then it get somewhat hard. At least from my experience much of the course involved applying what you learn in algebra 2 and geometry.</p>
<p>Math IIC is much easier than the class.</p>
<p>It depends on your school. I took Honors Precalc last year and it was rough haha (everyone at my school say it’s harder than BC Calc!)</p>
<p>From the perspective of a math/secondary education major, it depends on your aptitude and the kind of teacher you have. Despite my rigorous studying and my love for math, I had a bad precalc teacher and didn’t learn much outside of trig, which is the real meat of the course. Perhaps you’ll get it better than I did if you have a better teacher. Calculus is the good stuff, especially if you have good teachers. I maintain that calculus, even in the college level, is far easier than precalc, but again, it depends on the person.</p>
<p>Trigonometry is the most useful thing you’ll learn, and what I know best from the course. There’s also some logarithms and stuff that expands from algebra 2. If like me you didn’t do great then, you’re going to struggle here. Hold out for calculus: that’s when it all will(finally) make sense. Unfortunately, there’s also polars and stuff that are confusing and I find it less applicable in my current studies. Preview trig. That’s the important stuff.</p>