<p>My school offers AP Calc but since I'm taking pre-calc my senior year, I can't take it. Would taking calculus at a community college at the same time look just as good as taking it in school? Thanks!</p>
<p>P.S.
I am applying to most of my schools as a Geology or Earth/Planetary Science major, so I understand that having calculus is imperative.</p>
<p>Taking calculus while in high school is not required for most colleges, though you should be ready to take calculus in your frosh year in college if you want to do a major that requires it.</p>
<p>Precalculus including trigonometry is a prerequisite for the calculus courses for science majors, though calculus courses for business majors may not require it.</p>
<p>Well I’ve heard from numerous people, including a college counselor, that not having taken calculus when your school offers is looks really bad on an application, which is why I’m taking it at a local college instead. What I’m asking is if this will hold the same weight as a regular high school class.</p>
<p>If you are ready to take Calculus, just take it. Don’t waste your time taking pre-calc and calc at the same time. That would be absolutely pointless.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. Pre-calculus isn’t named well…it’s an extension of Algebra II more than anything else, and you don’t have to understand everything in pre-calculus to begin calculus. </p>
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<p>AP is generally considered better because it’s more standardized. But what’s the point of asking if you won’t be able to take the AP class anyway? Taking the community college course would be better than nothing.</p>
<p>I’d say it would carry about the same weight - it’s how I did it, via a dual enrollment course (taught at high school, but for college credit). You can level the playing field by taking the AP exam and doing well on it to show that you learned the same stuff that the AP students learned. </p>
<p>Don’t worry about pre-calculus being a pre-req for calculus, if you’re concerned about that at all. I found most of pre-calc to be useless stuff that I had already learned in previous classes, albeit a little more in-depth. There were maybe one or two concepts I learned in pre-calc that were useful for calculus that I hadn’t already learned previously.</p>
<p>Here are some placement tests that will assess your readiness to take a college-level calculus course:</p>
<p>[Calculus</a> Diagnostic Placement Exam | Department of Mathematics at University of California Berkeley](<a href=“http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/placement-exam]Calculus”>http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/placement-exam)</p>
<p>[Placement</a> Test](<a href=“http://math.tntech.edu/e-math/placement/index.html]Placement”>http://math.tntech.edu/e-math/placement/index.html)</p>
<p>Thank you all!</p>