HI! I am not sure whether to choose to take AP CALC or NORMAL CALC. I am not horrible at math and tend to catch on very quickly. I know that the Normal Calculus Course at my school is REALLY EASY, while the AP Calculus AB is challenging. My record with math courses however has not been the best. I have only signed up for 1 AP for my junior year. I really want to enroll in the AP Calc course, because I know that I am good at math. Also, I am not going to deny that one other big reason that I want to enroll in this course is that colleges will look at my schedule and not appreciate that I didn’t take more than 1 AP course, if I could. I do not know what to do. Please give some comment on this situation or give your own experience with AP Calc AB (or anything really). Thank you in advance.
If you will be taking calculus in 11th grade, then you are two grades ahead, so you must be good at math, right?
Calculus AB is slower paced than calculus in college, so it is generally seen as equivalent to the first semester of calculus in college. So it should not be excessively hard for a strong-in-math high school student.
@ucbalumnus Yes, I mean I think that I am fairly good at math. I have been taking all honors math courses. But I am not sure if I should take this course and risk my GPA. If you took it, do you think that it was a easy/ manageable course?
Take AP Calc AB. Its a one semester college course stretched over a year. If you want to major in anything involving math you should take this. Colleges want to see you take a rigorous schedule…not just get easy As.
IMHO the reason your math grades haven’t been what you want is found in the first sentence. A lot of kids implicitly believe a “fixed intelligence” theory. Everyone has aptitudes and they’ll do well in those areas almost without effort, better to avoid those areas they are not strong in.
But believing you “catch on very quickly” may mean you aren’t studying as much as you should and/or the way you should in math. The rubber meets the road and you don’t get top grades. It doesn’t really matter whether you “catch on very quickly” or not. I guarantee you there are kids in your math classes that don’t match your quick intellect but are getting better grades.
What to do? Read the book “Make it Stick” this summer that talks about what is known about learning, with lots of tips for HS and college kids. You’ll learn about ideas like self-testing and distributed practice. Catching on, which you laud yourself for, is not the same as being able to recall & apply concepts on a test. As you’ve seen. What you need to do is practice.
Get a book like the “Calculus Problem Solver” (it’s similar to a SAT review book but focuses on calculus, there are similar books for many topics). Go to the chapter that matches what your class is studying that week, cover the answers, start working. When you can readily solve problems in practice you will readily solve them on tests and the grades will take care of themselves. This is self-testing.
Second is forgetting. A lot of kids study just before the test, but that is an ineffective strategy of massing all their study in one chunk. The way learning works is you learn something and then immediately start to forget it. If you want to keep what you’ve learned then you need to practice it again and again. Once you get a tennis serve down you’re not done. Same with the piano or violin. You need to practice to keep up proficiency, practice even more to improve. Academic learning uses the same neurons and follow the same biology.
Third is reviewing for a test. You shouldn’t review for a test! Solve new problems. The problem with reading thru old notes, homework, etc. that most kids do is that it confuses recognition with recall. It all looks familiar but on a test students discover they can’t recall it. Don’t find this out on the test, do sample problems before you’re doing them for keeps.
If you can commit to several hours study for AP Calculus each week (reading the chapter, homework, practice on your own) spread over several days of the week you will do just fine.
@mikemac thanks for the book suggestion. I figured my kid probably needs this book also, as he is a notorious crammer and he has this stupid rule about not studying hard until he gets his first bad grade in a class. He’s gotten away with this so far but I have a feeling this technique comes to a halt at Berkeley.
What do you plan to major in at college? If it’s STEM related it’s probably a good idea to take AP Calc. If your planned major does not require a calculus class you are probably fine with your regular calc class.
@mikemac thank you so much for your suggestion. I have decided to take AP Calc AB this coming year!