<p>Beware of the "advice" you get. 95% of the posters here are students too and basically everything they affirm to be absolute truths are is just speculation. </p>
<p>This is kind of a response to the "is calc necessary?" thread. How can you possibly expect to get good answers from this board? Either call the school or go to a better board, like college admissions.</p>
<p>Note that this is for advice strictly based on college admissions, not advice in general. If you need to know whether or not to date in high school or something then yes I guess it's cool to ask it here. But half the advice I've ever gotten has been from people who are just as clueless as I am.</p>
<p>True, a lot of it is based on speculation and this should be beared in mind, but these people have often had the same issue as you. Maybe they did call the school, and because they’re in such a similar situation they can offer advice.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone has complete trust in the advice of random strangers on the Internet, and those who do probably deserve whatever happens as a result of following said advice as if it’s gospel.
But isn’t it just common sense that calculus would help and would give you an edge over the people who took stats?</p>
<p>“Actually yes, I saw a comment saying ‘You don’t NEED calculus!’”</p>
<p>Probably because they didn’t succeed in it or didn’t take it themselves and want to believe it doesn’t matter at all. Presumably they still have enough common sense to know that it would be helpful, even though it wasn’t a dealbreaker for their college admissions.</p>
<p>“How is it common sense that Calc > Stats?”</p>
<p>Calculus is known to be more difficult in high school. (I don’t know about in general. In the end, statistics uses calculus and calculus uses statistics.) It has higher-level prerequisites and is more likely to be taken by honors students. The fact that they were even asking the question indicates that they know that much. And colleges want you to take the most difficult/rigorous classes.</p>
<p>Really? Calculus isn’t by any mean necessary. I have some friends that went to college and said that they basically wasted their time worrying about if Cal would matter in High School. In the end they still ended up in Calculus. Why waste time on something that you would do later on anyway.</p>
<p>“Why waste time on something that you would do later on anyway.”</p>
<p>Because it’d help you get in, basically. A lot of colleges recommend it in their lists of requirements for admission. And some people do get out of some college calculus because they already knew it from high school.
Though it’s probably more important to take calculus if you’re planning some kind of STEM-related major.</p>
<p>It’s mostly the extremely selective or math/science-specialized that directly say they want calculus if it’s available to you. Harvey Mudd even requires it but I’m not sure if there are any others.
But most selective colleges want you to take the most advanced courses available to you - and for a lot of people, the honors math sequence ends with calculus. If you’re concerned with having a rigorous schedule for college there’s no real reason not to try it, if you did reasonably well in pre-calc. I think it’s easier than trig, at least what I’ve learned in high school.
I would think that AP Stats and pre-calc would be okay for a non-STEM inclined person, but I don’t really have any evidence to support that hypothesis.</p>
<p>Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take Cal. But like the idea of it being needed it overrated. It would be nice to have that on your schedule but what if you get a C for example. That would seem more disappointing to colleges then getting an A/B in pre-cal/AP Stat. Thus hurt your chances more then if you simply didn’t take the class…
At least that is my theory.</p>
<p>Well, people should take pre-calc first and if they don’t get an A/mid-B in it then calculus might not be the best idea. With any honors class there’s a higher risk of getting a bad grade.</p>
<p>From what I have seen Pre-cal is basically a more advanced version of Algrebra 2 for me. I’m not sure how Calculus would be compared to Pre-Cal. Right now I know that I’m under this false pretense that Cal would be as easy as Pre-Cal.</p>
<p>Yeah. Pre-calc seemed like a bunch of random miscellaneous stuff someone thought everybody should know before starting calculus. Usually trig and some analytic geometry. </p>
<p>I’d probably look at some basic limit/derivative stuff and see if it looks comprehensible. It’s certainly possibly to teach calculus badly, but there are tons of resources for it on the Internet and I think anyone who has the prerequisites and is willing to study a little on their own can succeed in it.</p>
<p>But this thread is supposed to be about the dubious nature of people’s advice on here, so we should probably talk about that. Even though I think I was the one who started the digression. :o</p>
<p>Agreed. Like I don’t expect some complicated stuffs (well not complicated for me) in Calculus. Like I expect it to be difficult but how difficult will it be for me, someone who’s good at math.</p>
<p>I got a B in honors pre-calc, a B+ in AP Calc AB and an A- in AP Calc BC. Basically, I found that calculus was significantly easier than pre-calc.</p>