Sophmore year I will be taking precal since I already took the other prerequisite math courses. I plan on taking precal over the summer so I can go straight into calculus during sophmore year. Is it a good idea? Is a strong foundation of precal essential for calculus? Thanks!
Wait, so are you planning on taking precalculus or calculus during sophomore year?
Yes, of course. But some pre-calculus topics aren’t directly covered in Calculus AB.
I have a pretty strong foundation of algebra 1 and 2 and geometry. Will a summer of just precal be good enough to have a strong calculus year or would you suggest taking the course the entire year
Personally, I think only selective parts of Pre-calc are useful for Calculus. Stuff like trig identities, logarithms, etc. However, I would defer to what someone like @MITer94 advises, since he is one of the big league math majors I’ve seen on CC thus far.
@psok26 you can probably just take pre-calc over the summer.
@NotYetEngineer true, although Calculus BC is a bit more involved (one needs to have some familiarity with vectors and vector-valued functions, polar and spherical coordinates, decomposing via partial fractions, and series).