<p>A question for all of you intelligent children...</p>
<p>My son is a junior. He has done well in math and has always garnered A/A- on the honor's track....up until honors precal where he crashed and burned (he had heard that this was the "hardest" course in the school from both students and teachers and he did go away on a humanities trip for three weeks during this time which is what really killed him). So, he is now in non-honors, non-AP Calc. This is a breeze for him and, after the first month (block scheduling, so 1/4 of the way through) he has an A. Next semester....he is considering AP BC Calc. Yes or no? Should he take AB first or is this similar to the regular Calc he is now in? He can't have any more crash and burn type grades.</p>
<p>It depends whether AB is considered a pre-req for BC. If at your son’s school BC is considered a more difficult variant of AB, take BC. BC only has a few more topics than AB (literally about a week or two’s worth). If, however, AB and BC are considered sequential courses than he may need to take AB. AB contains the vast majority of calc topics and he may be lost in BC. In the latter case, I’d have him ask the BC teacher what the class is going to cover as most BC classes review AB extensively. However, keep in mind that most everyone else will already have seen the material. At the end of the term, he should probably look over some old AP AB tests to see how well his current class has prepared him and go from there.</p>
<p>Tapper7 is right. Some schools offer BC as a supplement, to be taken after AB, others (the more usual) offer it as harder version. I know at one block scheduling prep school , BC contains only the material not in AB, so kids take both.</p>