<p>So my counselor recommended me for Calc BC junior year. After reading all this I have no idea what she was thinking. Right now as a sophomore, I’m only in algebra II/trig (honors)…so I think I’ll stick with AB next year and take BC senior year. I think the fact that so much of BC is AB will complement my forthcoming senioritis nicely =)</p>
<p>BC is literally like…2 chapters more than AB. Do the BC. It really isn’t that hard, especially if you are good with math.</p>
<p>BC might be “two chapters more”. But you really need to understand those “two” chapters. Oh, and trust me. Integration by parts might just be a “formula” but you’ve got to really be savy to apply it. Polar stuff and series ain’t cakewalks either. Maybe the rudiments could be grasped easily, but to really know what you’re doing requires time, effort, and practice.</p>
<p>BC is a joke. Seriously. From a guy who learned some basic differentiation and integration, then studied the rest on his own, BC is a cakewalk. </p>
<p>Parts is just that. A formula. Despite what Arachnotron said, you don’t require any ‘savvyness’. You look an integral. Spend about…20 seconds playing with it to see if you can use a u-sub. If not, Parts. C’mon guys, it’s not like you are doing a trig-sub or anything of the sort. </p>
<p>Series? OH PLEASE! The series are even more of a joke. If you even have some REMOTE understanding of the test, hell, if you just know the formula for the tests, then you are done. Easy. </p>
<p>Trig-sub? I don’t recall seeing that anywhere. The way PR teaches it, you don’t even do the trig sub! It’s like “Play with this, and boom! You get arcsin x!” Rather pathetic. No use of Trigonometric identities, no complex use for parts, I’m just not seeing the big deal. </p>
<p>A lot of the Polar is common sense. Mind you, this is the only section that I think might require a little more thought, especially if you don’t know your basic shapes. But even then, just by looking at the questions, you can generally eliminate most answers in the multiple choice (especially the ones involving integration, since usually, 3/5 don’t have the right format).</p>
<p>About the FR - I guess I forgot.</p>
<p>You don’t need much more than rudimentary knowledge of polar or parametric functions anyway. They give you easy questions for those.</p>
<p>I have to make this decision next year. Yet I’m good at Math, I just don’t like it enough to take it in AP, but I will. 
If I can’t choose I will take the easy way out and take Honors Calculus and AP Stats, but the School recommends if you get an A in Pre Calc Honors go to BC, B go to AB, and if you get a C go to Honors, D and Lower: Regular.</p>
<p>Yes I have to agree that most of the stuff from BC is just knowing the formula. You really don’t need to be savy, you just need to be able to know how to deal with the formula. If you are naturally gifted at math, its fine. If not, sure, you might need to do some practice, but from what I’ve looked at, this stuff does not look hard at all. Also, from what I’ve read and seen, the BC topics are tested more straight-forward than the AB topics because they are allegedly harder than the AB topics.</p>
<p>Neither AB nor BC actually force you to understand the math behind what you’re learning. That is, no theory and certainly no proofs. Basically, you learn a few concepts (limits, derivatives, integrals, sequences/series, and some applications) and then you learn the formulas and how to spit it back out.</p>
<p>AP Calculus (AB or BC), I feel, is really inadequate for college math. At my school (Hopkins), I frequently see freshmen and sophomores struggle with Calc I and II even though many of them took AP in high school and did quite well. The AP exam can only ask so many types of questions so as a result, questions tend to repeat from year to year, just with slightly different wording and different numbers.</p>
<p>^
This is why the College Board should just ask permission from Mu Alpha Theta to borrow their tests for Multiple Choice. While some of them are pretty easy, the overall difficulty is above AP. </p>
<p>Alternatively, they could just throw away the multiple choice and toss in a 12 questions FR, 1.5 hour exam. </p>
<p>Then again, I’ve never taken College Math. I’ve just tutored people who are currently taking it.</p>
<p>The problem is that Mu Alpha Theta questions test a person’s ability to creatively solve math problems by fully utilizing the “tools of math” that they know. The purpose of AP Calc is to see if a student can master the concepts of Calculus and apply them. I do agree, however, that the exam is way too basic, especially in the free response - when I took AB last year, I walked in knowing 4 of the 6 FRQ’s essentially word for word. </p>
<p>They should go back to the older formats where the exam was less analytical and more problem-solving based. Instead of just making a kid use his calculator to find inflection points and whatnot, they ought to put in tricky integrals and derivatives to see if students truly understand the depth of the material.</p>
<p>I actually found that quite annoying while going through the review book. I self studied all the AP topics through a textbook I bought, and I never used a calculator for everything. It was very disappointing to find out that the test has a love affair with using calculators to solve problems. I’d rather be given a tricky integral and try to mess around with it than to just plug it into my calculator. Sadly, the AP Calc test is not alone in what it tests AP-wise. All the AP tests seem to be more geared towards do you know the concept rather than do you know how to use the concepts to solve new problems.</p>
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These two statements seemed to contradict themselves. If you truly “master the concepts of Calculus” and are able to “apply them”, you should be able to "creatively solve math problems by fully utilizing the ‘tools of math’ " that you know. </p>
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<p>How is this unlike Mu Alpha Theta?</p>