<p>I don’t see a reason to require anything other than business calculus for marketing. I personally think that linear algbra (algebra-based) would be more useful for a marketing major.</p>
<p>That said, in my son’s school, a lot of kids that did very well in their respective high-schools come in thinking that they’re going to be scientists or engineers. They have to take calc, physics and another science or engineering course. A lot of these kids will have to work harder than they’ve ever worked before to pass these courses. The courses move quickly and there’s no spoon-feeding. There are outside-of-the-box questions that require thinking where formulaic approaches don’t work. There are also some kids that breeze right through these courses. The range of kids coming in is very, very wide.</p>
<p>In son’s CS program, the Computing I course is a killer in terms of work. Some 80 to 90 labs, 3,000 pages of reading, short essays, quizzes, tests, etc. If you want the CS degree, you’re going to have to do a lot of labs and projects and math proofs and first semester freshman year is a brutal time to learn it but it’s the best place to learn it as you can move on if you don’t want to do the same for the next seven semesters.</p>
<p>And when you get your degree and your first job, it may be just like it was in college or maybe it will be easier. If you have the degree, you know that you’ll be up to the job.</p>
<p>Along with the line about engineering being “pre-business,” the prereqs and intro classes for the nursing program where I work, esp. A and P, math, and the intro nursing class, might as well be called “pre-sociology.”</p>
<p>Passing a course doesn’t mean you learned enough to feel you have mastered the material. Are complaining people thinking a C is good enough when HS C’s won’t get a student into college? Calculus needs to begin early on in order to give time later for other courses. It is better for the least capable students to find a different major- better than finding out you can’t find a job after you graduate when there is a huge surplus of grads with your major. I don’t see why freshmen need to ease into college- the courses most take are the intro level courses, not the advanced ones taken typically by majors only. There are plenty of students who do just fine with their course load- if there were significant numbers not able to do the work things would have been changed. It is always tough when it is your kid, for some reason or other, doesn’t do as well as you/s/he hope. </p>
<p>Another thought- perhaps raising the bar is needed because so many students currently want to get a business degree. With calculators and computers now calculus can be used more for economics and business modeling- an exposure to it even if one doesn’t use it may help in understanding the theories driving the way things are done. Not everyone who enters college should finish, and many find they discover a different field than they set out to study. I know UW-Madison has several calculus courses available and that the business school requires the same sequence many science students need, they must have reasons. Also remember that college is for an education, not just job training.</p>
<p>I can certainly see the value of weeder courses. And by that I mean value for the student, as has been said, why get to the end of a road and realize you have wasted your time. Somewhere in the middle of the beginning seems reasonable.
However, on the other hand, I think it is unfortunate that some of the student to student chatter about, for eg, pre med grades can be so limiting. Where can a student get real information? We have recently encountered a situation where this is causing my student to completely feel that no goals are reachable. I have also heard that mid sophomore year is often a time for “reflection” and “re-evaluation”. A transitional time from the post HS joy of college to what the real world is going to be like. Anyone have any thoughts or knowledge on this?</p>
<p>“I have also heard that mid sophomore year is often a time for “reflection” and “re-evaluation”. A transitional time from the post HS joy of college to what the real world is going to be like”</p>
<p>That sounds about right to me. Almost exactly middle of my sophomore year I changed majors because I realized what I’d originally planned on was unrealistic, and after that period I was much more focused than I had been before.</p>