<p>Im pretty sure i just failed the ap calculus ab test...tear....does stanford have placement exams or do i have to repeat calculus again.</p>
<p>lol.</p>
<p>u dont know the score until you actually see it.</p>
<p>you'll probably be surprised at ur score since the curve is so nice.</p>
<p>so "my friend" skipped 12 questions in the MC part of the AP Calc BC test. does "my friend" still have a reasonable chance of obtaining a reasonable score?</p>
<p>Well if you took the BC, there is an AB subscore, so if you got all the AB-related questions right, you could end up with a high AB subscore.</p>
<p>yeah. well my trusty ti-83 stopped working on the first question of the fr.....and i had to wait a few minutes to get anothe one, so i was pretty frazzled and sucked pretty hard on that part.....this is the second ti 83+ that has stopped working on me....the screen gets a fragment and pixelated...ah it was bad. but onced i stopped hyperventilating i figure i did decent enough tto get a 2</p>
<p>lol let's keep the Numbers That Must Not Be Named out of conversation....jk sorry I had to incorporate Harry Potter somehow!!
calculator trouble is evil -_- like Voldemort except not quite as deadly...</p>
<p>If you don't get a high enough score you won't get college credit for the class. You can still go ahead and take the next level in math (either Math 42 if you took calc ab or math 51 if you took calc bc).</p>
<p>Don't get too discouraged. I thought I failed Calc BC last year (no joke -- I left so many things blank, including 2-3 free-response questions), but I wound up with a 4 on the overall test and an AB subscore of 5.</p>
<p>By the way... you an just sign up for any classes you like. I don't think they ever actually check the prereqs.</p>
<p>Although your advisor might strongly recommend that you take certain classes.</p>
<p>Also, there's one (and only one) surefire way to prevent calculator trouble: do it by hand. To me, complaining about calculator trouble (in most cases, anyway) seems like complaining about how you can't find your crutches when your broken leg healed five years ago.</p>
<p>sly, thats pretty impressive if you can do definite integrals with three-decimal place endpoints</p>
<p>haha yeah...some of the calculator section questions were doable w/o a calculator, but not the messy decimal ones. not for us anyway</p>
<p>I bet Sly Si actually could figure out definite integrals accurate to three decimal places in the time allowed...</p>
<p>And I bet LeBron James could play basketball on a broken leg. No, really, he could probably still score 40 points on the Wizards.</p>
<p>
[quote]
By the way... you an just sign up for any classes you like. I don't think they ever actually check the prereqs.
[/quote]
Sooo...what's the point of APs (excluding the foreign languages), then? If all they're good for is "advanced placement", and at Stanford you can place yourself advancedly without any prerequisites.</p>
<p>the point is for the college board to steal more of our money</p>
<p>Yeah, things to three decimal places are a good excuse to pull out the calculator. I was actually thinking more along the lines of the SAT, which tends not to require one. However:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You can (probably) still do it by hand. It's been a long time since I took AP calc tests, so I don't remember those. But on the SAT, you don't need a calculator. I used it on one question, and that was because I didn't want to try taking a square root by hand.</p></li>
<li><p>Questions that require the use of a calculator simply should not be written. Shame on the College Board.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Edit: Actually, with multiple-choice tests, it's conceivable that there would be reasons to put stuff in decimal form rather than exact form, as it makes it harder to guess. But non-exact form answers just make a problem ugly. Very, very ugly.</p>
<p>Some schools give you credit for AP classes. Stanford sort of does. You can kill part of the 180 unit requirement. That's it really... minus language placement (no requirement vs. a year of language requirement). There isn't really much reason to take APs senior year if you're going to Stanford.</p>
<p>sly, i disagree. although it makes sense for the SAT math/logic test to not necessitate a calculator, i dont think the same is true for an AP Calc test - since if you were to go into any maht-intensive career you would end up dealing with calculation of decimals and enormous numbers all the time</p>
<p>Actually, that's a very good argument. My primary motivation for disdaining the use of calculators is that it allows you to do some things on the calculator that you should be able to do by hand (like solving equations, computing infinite sums, etc.). This is definitely more of a factor on the SAT than on AP Calc. I will say that TI-89s should probably be disallowed on AP Calc, if they aren't already.</p>
<p>Of course, in the case of the SAT, banning calculators might just be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It doesn't change the content at all, but that's a topic for another thread.</p>
<p>so -- briefly -- to the topic at hand:</p>
<p>re: math placement, your choices are threefold: below math 51, math 51, and 51h</p>
<p>most take 51, those who love math take 51h, and if you haven't done calc yet you take below 51</p>
<p>you have a few weeks at the beginning of the quarter to decide, so no pressure</p>