<p>Well. I am currently a high school senior, planning on attending a local state college for a year and transferring to the flagship program for my major (i was rejected early).
My question is, is it normal to retake a class you did well in?</p>
<p>I am currently averaging a 97 in my precal class. However, I have not learned anything. My teacher is new, and despite his amazing credentials that probably led my school to hiring him, he has yet to scratch the surface of "precal" and I find myself four months away from sign out and still having 7 months worth of new material to learn. </p>
<p>My desired major (Kinesiology at Umass Amherst) has a requirement for two years of calculus for life and social sciences.</p>
<p>I am just wondering if I take precalculus before I transfer, how would that affect my chances? How would that set me back in my studies? </p>
<p>TL;DR: Doing good in precalculus becuase my teacher has not taught anything new yet, wondering how i would be affected by retaking it and then transferring?</p>
<p>If this is in the wrong place, feel free to move it, I don't really know how to operate this site.</p>
<p>The main question I have is how do you know how much “New” material is left and that you won’t cover it? I took Calc1 in high school, got a 5 on the AP test, and then in Calc 2 was surprised that most of what I learned we HAD gone over back in high school Calc AB, with some exceptions.</p>
<p>Maybe you’re just doing well because you’re well prepared and genuinely had an understanding of the material before you’ve gone in?</p>
<p>@Alesteors- You’re absolutely right. I don’t know how much “new” material we cover, as every teacher teaches in a different order.
However, the first six (or eight, i don’t have the book on me so I can’t check) chapters in my math book are what we learned towards the end of Algebra 2 last year. Most teachers finish this by the end of October, where as at the end of October my class didn’t have a permanent teacher, rather a “permanent sub” (when I say my teacher is “new” i mean literally “new”, as in hired during the year).</p>
<p>Gotcha. Well unless you start doing badly in the course, it seems like you, in general, understand the material and it’s not that it’s difficult, just slow. So my advice would be go on to calc. It MIGHT be a bit of catch up but overall honestly, I don’t think it will be that difficult for you and to retake an ENTIRE course would probably put you at a bigger set back.</p>
<p>Plus, usually you don’t need to decide you schedule until May/June, so by that time the year will be coming to a close and you can have a better idea of how far you DID end up getting–because who know, you might be surprised! At the moment though, I’d recommend moving on to calc.</p>
<p>If you score green on all or most categories, you are ready for calculus.</p>
<p>(Note: the course numbers you may see referenced here mean: 1A = calculus for math and engineering majors; 16A = calculus for business and some biology majors; 32 = precalculus.)</p>
<p>To be honest, a lot of people (myself included) have forgotten a lot (or all) of precalc by the time they get to their calculus classes. It usually isn’t a problem to pick it up along the way, usually the professor anticipates this and gives a quick review of a precalc concept before applying it to calculus.</p>
<p>^ I would say that’s probably true as well. I don’t think it would look bad to retake it so much as it would be a waste of time for the most part.</p>
<p>Thank you all for the answers. Ill make sure to check out the test when I get on a computer. I figure if I go to calc like you all suggest I’ll be smart enough to know the difference between playing catchup and being completely lost.</p>
<p>I never had a pre-calc class and did fine in calculus. I did have to learn a few trig identities and rules of exponentials and logarithms, but that was just two afternoons of “review”. </p>
<p>Anything else that’s popularly discussed to death in prec-calc classes (conic sections, sequences and series, arithmetic with complex numbers, analytic geometry, etc) is either irrelevant for calculus or will be introduced from scratch when you actually need it.</p>