<p>I am a high school junior and my counselor strongly recommended me to take another math course during my senior year. I am taking AP Calculus this year and I don't really want to take another math course next year, especially because I am weaker in math than in any other subjects. </p>
<p>Thank you in advance.</p>
<p>Getting through Calculus as a junior is a great accomplishment if math is not your favorite subject, so good for you! Highly selective colleges will want to see you taking the most rigorous courses your school offers, so I agree with your counselor that another year of math would make you a stronger applicant. If AP Statistics is offered, you might consider that. It would be useful for future social science and psych classes, and many find it easier than Calculus (assume you took AB Calculus this year and would take BC next year). </p>
<p>If the BC Calculus teacher is good, do consider taking another year. My D (not a math kid) wound up at a university which only gave credit for AP scores of 5 (which she did not have in Calculus), so she had to take Calculus as a first-year. If she had not had a math class her senior year of high school, she would have been really rusty and would probably have struggled.</p>
<p>Finally, if you have a community college in your area that allows HS students to take summer classes, you could take a math class there. This would show admissions officers that you understood the importance of taking more math but needed to free space in your senior year schedule to follow your passions (this obviously only works if your passions don’t look like two free periods but rather classes that are legit). Our community college lets HS students enroll in two summer classes at no charge. You may not wind up getting college credit (D’s uni does not give credit for cc classes), but it might help you with admissions. </p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Where do you want to go to college? If your competition will be other students who’ve taken four years of math, then the decision not to take four years of math is one you should not make lightly.</p>
<p>Calculus is already the top level at many high schools, and being two years ahead in math indicates it is a strong (not weak) subject for you. What math would you take next year if you did?</p>
<p>In a chances thread he posted, he says he is taking Calc BC this year. In that case, I don’t think a 4th year is necessary. Very few kids have MV calc by high school graduation, it is not at all expected.</p>
<p>Your 4 years may have already been done - check your transcript. In our state, advanced kids can take Algebra 1 and geometry in middle school and they are considered HS courses and grade counts in HS gpa…so after algebra 2 and pre-cal most students have 4 years of math. Now a separate concern is that top schools want to see rigor into senior year and they prefer that you still take the cores: english, science, math, history, maybe language. For various reasons this usually doesn’t happen, but if you don’t take math, then be sure you fill the space with another AP and not just a fluff class or getting out early. Mine were done with language and science and wasn’t anything else to take in senior year that didn’t conflict with other classes, but did take AP english, AP math plus 2-3 other APs and both were accepted to rigorous schools (but not ivies). It is good to check potential colleges though, one school D looked at required 4 years of language which she didn’t have. Some schools (or program) may be same for math.</p>
<p>@Sikorsky</p>
<p>I considered taking AP stats next year but my school obviously isn’t going to offer it. My school counselor still strongly recommends me to take math another year… I have no idea what’s going to be offered for math next year.</p>
<p>If you’ll have finished BC Calculus, then there aren’t a whole lot of cases in which skipping math would be disastrous.</p>
<p>If you want to go to MIT, you should find some math to take somewhere: online, community college, something. If you want to become an astronomer, ditto. If you want to go to Yale or Stanford or Swarthmore, not taking a suitable math class that your high school offered might be seen as a missed opportunity, but I think even then, having completed two semesters of college calculus by the end of eleventh grade would demonstrate that you’ve pursued a serious course of math study reasonably far.</p>
<p>If your high school isn’t offering a suitable math class next year, and you don’t want to become an engineer or an astronomer or a mathematician, I think you can stop after BC calculus.</p>
<p>But here’s a question worth learning the answer to: does this counselor of yours feel so strongly about a fourth year of math that he or she would say your course load is less than “most rigorous” without it. If so, then what math does he or she recommend? And if the math that he or she recommends is ridiculously wrong for you (e.g., a Consumer Math class that is designed for, and taken exclusively by, people who can’t average a list of numbers), get somebody from the Math Department to help you explain this fact to the counselor.</p>
<p>Even if you want to be an engineering, physics, or math major, completing calculus BC is enough or more than enough for the entry standards of every university in the US. Of course, if you really like math, and have the opportunity to take more advanced math at a local college (completing BC usually exhausts the college-prep math offerings at most high schools, other than perhaps statistics), then that can be a plus, but is not really necessary.</p>
<p>What does your counselor suggest that you take for a math course?</p>