Should I self-study Pre-Calc?

<p>I am a sophomore in high school right now, and am in Integrated 3(11th grade math). Well, if I dont skip pre calc as a class I will only finish Calc AB by graduation. Should I self study pre-calc next summer? I consider myself pretty good at Math, its usually my "slack off" class because I get the concepts pretty fast, and so far I got perfect scores on every unit test this year. So yeah if I am gonna slack off in normal pre-calc next year I thought I might as well self study that and go right into AP Calc AB my Junior year. Advice? (I'll ask my teacher as well)</p>

<p>Will your school allow you to test out of it?</p>

<p>Yes I know 2 people who skipped Pre-calc and took AP Calc their freshman year</p>

<p>And you would take AP Calculus BC in your senior year? Could you just go directly into AP Calculus BC as a senior after taking pre-calculus as a junior?</p>

<p>Pretty sure I need to take AB before BC. I am not a genius at math either, so wont work</p>

<p>At a lot of schools AB and BC will start at the same place (the equivalent of college Calculus I), except AB only covers Calculus I and BC goes into Calculus II material.</p>

<p>Well at our school I think its better to take AB then BC. And if I went straight to BC it would be pushing it a bit too much.</p>

<p>But anyways, how is pre-calc? I heard its like a joke class in my school that just covers integrated 3 stuff</p>

<p>^ yes to halcyonheather. You should make sure. At my school, you can’t take BC after you’ve taken AB b/c you would’ve learned 1/2 the curriculum in AB already. Also… Pre-Calc is the hardest year of math (at least at my school), so just make sure you can handle it on your own.</p>

<p>I would do it. I also tested out of Pre-Calc to take Calc BC last year. To me, there really wasn’t much to it.</p>

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<p>I tested out of pre-calculus…it wasn’t terribly difficult, but you should take it seriously because you need to really learn the material and (on some level) remember it for calculus. You can start learning calculus without knowing pre-calculus material, but eventually it all becomes relevant. There are a lot of things you need to know about that Algebra II-equivalent math doesn’t always cover…see [url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precalculus]here[/url”>Precalculus - Wikipedia]here[/url</a>].</p>

<p>@Latin I handle regular math pretty well so I am not worried about Pre-Calc at all. If I take that class next year I will end up sitting in class bored like I did for all my math classes before, and they spend like 2 weeks on the same stuff. Plus, we have AP incentive at our school meaning if we get 3 or above on the AP test we get our grade for the year bumped up according to the score.</p>

<p>@Idomoniate OK good to know</p>

<p>Then go for it! Just double check if you can take BC after AB of that is what you want to do.</p>

<p>@hal theres not too much “modifying”(forgot the right word) equations like you do in AP Physics is there? Stuff like: X=1/2At2 → t=squareroot2X/A → so on. Stuff like that kills me</p>

<p>@Latin yes you can thats what you are expected to do in our school.</p>

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<p>Equations in need of solving show up pretty much everywhere, and sometimes that requires writing everything in terms of some other variable. Math class problems are usually designed to minimize nasty computations.
I think you can fix this by reviewing basic algebra, though.</p>