Hi, I am a rising senior at my school and have been in an early college program since somphmore year. I signed up for honors-precalc for next year, but am wondering if I should just try and take calculus. I took algebra 2 for my junior year and this summer I’m taking college algebra at a community college. One of the tutors reccomended that I should take calculus, which is the next class after college algebra here. I’m unsure if skipping precalculus is a good idea though. Thanks for the help.
It depends how far you got up to in Algebra 2. If you covered the unit circle and some complex triganometry you will be fine. Just be sure to teach yourself limits over the summer. I went from regular Precalc to AP Calc, and Precalc was just a recap of Honors Algebra 2. My friends in Honors Precalc covered trigonometry in December while I covered it in May, and all of them said they didn’t use anything taught after the unit circle when we were in AP Calc together.
If you don’t have a good foundation in the pre-calculus math concepts then don’t take calculus. [url=<a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-course-overviews/ap-calculus-ab-course-overview.pdf%5DThis%5B/url”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-course-overviews/ap-calculus-ab-course-overview.pdf]This[/url] lists some of the classes and math concepts you need to be successful in AP Calculus AB.
Hmm I didn’t learn much of those. Looking at those I’m actually pretty confused, maybe I should just stick to precalc.
I would stick to Pre-calc
Ditto
Most high schools have a math sequence of algebra2-precalc-calc. There is no college algebra in the usual sequence. Is your college algebra just covering the same material as in precalculus?
College algebra = high school pre-calculus. Two different names, same thing. In both cases the next class in thebsequence is calculus 1.
If you were recommended for calculus, take it, but check drop/add deadlines in case you read the syllabus and it’s too hard.
If you don’t intend on being a stem major (or even if you do but will start in engineering calculus 1 in college) I’d recommend taking the easiest calculus class, either 'applied calculus ’ or 'business calculus ’ for instance.
Thanks for the advice. I think what I’ll do is talk to the precalc teacher after the first day of school and ask about the AP calc teacher and talk to them about this. Taking precalc doesn’t sound so bad I did Algebra 1,Geometry, Algebra 2 all honors my first 3 years, so I would have four years of math with precalc, it’s not like I skipped a year and that’s why I’m doing precalc senior year. And learning more basics would help for when I’d take calculus later on.
I do have 37 college credits from the local community college since my somphore year and I’ll be doing 6 more credits this fall. So that should help when applying to universities even without AP calc,hope they’d take most of my credits.
So my precalc honors teacher is my algebra 2 honors teacher from last year. I’ll talk to him about AP calc and see what he reccomends tommorow.
From what I’ve gathered there seems to be some difference in college algebra courses. Another poster described their college algebra as coming before precalculus in the cc’s course guide. Find out what your course covers.
I finished a college algebra course over the summer but looking at pre calc syallbuses I didn’t learn everything from it. Some of the things were also pretty brief since it was only 8 weeks long and it was difficult for me to retain some of the info even though I got an A.
In my opinion, you should try Calculus. It’ll give your app a fairly significant boost, because colleges want to see you do challenging courses. Personally, I haven’t taken precalculus either (I’m a rising junior), but I’m still taking AP Calculus BC this coming year. I had to pass a placement exam too, to prove I had the right level.
Before the course, if you just complement whatever knowledge you already have with Khan Academy (that’s what I used) and other web videos, you should do fine in Calculus. Precalculus is really just a review of Algebra 2 with some extra trigonometry involved. It’s definitely the most “skippable” high school math course. Hope this helped!