My student failed first semester AP Calc then took calculus at a CC on the advise of a teacher and still only ended up with a D (professor was not helpful and had bad reviews). What’s the best course of action so it won’t look so bad on applications to 4yr universities? Try CC Calc course with another professor? Go back to pre-Calc in CC then Calc in CC? Pay for an online high school AP Calc course? They were always good at math and ended pre-Calc with a B+. HELP!
Take it at another community college with a prof with fantastic reviews. And teach your student to always check the reviews, to strive to take classes with the best teachers possible.
Even then, some people just hit the wall with calculus. Does your student want to go into a STEM field?
Exactly. Maybe statistics with a great grade is a better choice.
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She wants to be a veterinarian.
The student may want to figure out if precalculus knowledge is good: rurci3
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My son hated calculus. After high school he never looked at it again. His animal science degree only required college algebra or statistics. He just graduated veterinary school ranked #1 in his class. So if you need it to get into the undergrad school of your choice get a tutor watch you tube videos. Remember every college class including cc courses taken in high school will affect their GPA when applying to vet school. If it can be taken as only high school credit, online maybe might be best.
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If I’m understanding this right your kid took Calculus in HS and then started over at a CC at which time it should have been material she’d seen before (even if understood incompletely). It may be time to look at how she is studying the material.
It takes 6-10 hours per week of study in college-level math & science courses. This is time not only for reading the chapters and doing homework but in doing practice problems on one’s own. I agree with the advice about looking for videos, oline help sites, finding a good prof, but that only goes so far. It all can make perfect sense when listening but then you need to perform and that’s when many students find out they haven’t internalized the material.
As someone aiming for vet school she’ll be taking classes similar to pre-meds, recognized as a tough sequence. So the 6-10 hours per week in each class is what it will take.
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I would agree that if the student is struggling this much on the second pass, there is a problem. It could be that they’ve maxed out the math that they’ll be able to do with reasonable effort, it could be that they have a problem with their study techniques, or it could be that there is some foundational problem (a misunderstanding about exponents, for instance) that is becoming more detrimental.
And, on a different topic…a few years ago I talked to an experienced math teacher, and she said that she felt that we had sort of moved beyond being able to blame a poor outcome on a poor teacher because there are so many teaching resources available for free online now. Obviously if the test doesn’t align with the content or if the material is subjective there can be an issue. But, for something like math, chemistry, etc - if a student knows that the test will be on integration by parts, or fractions, or dehydration reactions, there are an abundance of videos that a student can use that teach the material.
Teaching matters, and a great teacher can make hard material much easier to understand. Interaction with a live teacher is ideal, and a teacher’s enthusiasm and knowledge can be infectious and mind-expanding. But, for capable students who just need a different or clearer explanation, there is almost always a video that can provide step-by-step instruction or a slightly different approach that makes more sense to the student.
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