<p>Is it harder than Calc BC?</p>
<p>lol. i can’t tell if you’re serious or not. it’s insanely rigorous. the psets are like 50 pages on latex.</p>
<p>Have you learned linear algebra yet? Is topology harder than Calc BC? Is abstract algebra harder than Calc BC? </p>
<p>How many proofs do you write for your AP calculus BC class? What kinds of things do you prove? Have you proved all the field properties and definitions of operations for the complex number system starting from the Peano axioms?</p>
<p>Hahahahahaha… sorry.</p>
<p>No high school class comes anywhere close to a mid to high-level college course in the subject. Not only is Math 55 harder than BC Calc, but so is Math 25, Math 23, Math 21, Math 20, Math 19… Math 1 is similar, from what I’ve heard.</p>
<p>The actual workload in college is generally smaller than it is in high school, particularly when you consider how much more free time you have (fewer classes that meet fewer times a week), but the material is much, much harder almost universally. Don’t assume that just because you’re taking AP courses that you know how difficult a subject can get.</p>
<p>Calc BC is joke.</p>
<p>College math better be a lot harder.</p>
<p>The average workload for Math 55 is 15-20 hours per week. This year, some 50+ students shopped Math 55. By week 3, there were 20+; by week 4 or 5, there were 12 left.</p>
<p>"Calc BC is joke.</p>
<p>College math better be a lot harder."</p>
<p>mbaboy- The difficulty of Calculus BC depends largely on the school- some go beyond the material required for the AP test, while others barely prepare their students at all. However, I can guarantee you this- if you want to find a challenging math course in college, you DEFINITELY will find one.</p>
<p>I’ve been at Harvard almost three months now, and one complaint I’ve never heard is “This class is too easy”- that’s something we left back in high school. (Of course, there are some classes that are pretty easy, mostly a subset of classes meant to fill core requirements for people that don’t specialize in the subject, but in general it’s very, very easy to construct a challenging courseload.</p>
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<p>That’s true – not because there are no easy classes, but because you know they’re easy when you sign up and you’ve chosen an easy class for a reason (like…you’re taking Math 55 the same semester!), so there’s nothing to complain about.</p>
<p>totally agree. Like my BC Calc teacher is craaazzzyyyyy hard! She goes WAY beyond the AP test. Seriously, we took a sample AP test four months into the class, and only 2 people in my class (out of 30) did not get a 5. It’s crazy.</p>
<p>I don’t know what Math 55 is like these days but it was insane when I took it a few decades ago. I remember getting a 57 on one test – and it was the highest grade in the class! Our professor, Konrad Osterwalder, was so disgusted that he gave us another test on the same material and I scored 55! Even this was charitable, as I mostly just moved symbols around on paper without much notion of what they meant. I never did succeed in understanding the calculus of manifolds. It was an early warning that I was not destined to be the next Euler.</p>
<p>Hmm, “I mostly just moved symbols around on paper without much notion of what they meant”</p>
<p>That testifies to the difficulty of math 55 but doesn’t put the class in a good light.
Everybody learns something from a horribly hard situation, like a test that bad, but why is it that you were left “without much notion of what [the symbols] meant” if you were taking a class you were interested in, at a good university, where there must have been good teachers and advisors?
Though the class is paced for talented people, it sounds like you were egged on, not taught, through the material.</p>
<p>Let’s have a *****-measuring contest for how difficult our math classes are! Awesome!</p>
<p>johnshade, what did you read about mathematics besides what was assigned?</p>
<p>Well, I think that I hit the wall with the calculus of manifolds. Math had always come easily to me before that and I was unprepared with coping strategies (or alternative learning strategies) when it suddenly got damnably difficult. I also subscribe to the theory that I saw mentioned recently that some people think better discretely and others think better continuously. With the single exception of real analysis, which I did very well in, I did much better in the discrete courses (e.g, algebra,* logic) than the continuous courses (complex analysis). I also think the quality of undergraduate pedagogy in the Harvard math department was highly variable – I may not have been particularly bright, but my Math 55 classmates were. And I read a lot outside class, token, and got far more from that than from many of my classes. To be fair, I was too stubborn and proud to ask for help, from classmates, TAs or professors; this was by far my biggest academic mistake.</p>
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<li>“Algebra” here is groups, rings, etc, not HS algebra.</li>
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<p>I have also heard it said that there is a great divide between learners who prefer geometry and learners who prefer algebra. I’m on the geometry side of that divide.</p>
<p>“the quality of undergraduate pedagogy in the Harvard math department was highly variable – I may not have been particularly bright, but my Math 55 classmates were.”</p>
<p>What do you mean? Do you mean the pedagogy was variable, period? Or that it actually worked for some students (who needed teaching and didn’t know the stuff already) but not for you? Or did these bright students not need any pedagogy at all, so their success does not testify to the quality of pedagogy?
I am applying to college to study math, and naturally I am concerned about what the experience is like for math majors…so, seriously, is the most advanced first year math class (math 55) divided into two groups of students who either don’t get anything from the pedagogy because they don’t need it or don’t get anything from the pedagogy and consequently fall behind?</p>
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<p>While I’m not in Math 55, I’m almost positive this isn’t the case. The reason is that the situation you’re describing is one found primarily in high school: many students don’t learn anything from classes while others can’t keep up. However, in a class as advanced as Math 55, you can pretty much guarantee that no students are slipping by in a class that they feel is too easy for them. (If there are exceptions to this, any Math 55 students should let me know).</p>
<p>Every student, however smart they are, HAS to do the work in a class to get a good grade, and almost everyone who can keep up learns a lot from any difficult class, particularly a class as ruthlessly challenging as Math 55.</p>
<p>Students who find Math 55 too hard usually drop down to Math 25 in the first few weeks of classes. In fact, the classes are intentionally scheduled to make transfer easy (see my post #6).</p>
<p>Profs vary in pedagogical skills. Some may be terrific mathematicians but not great at teaching. It depends greatly on the year.</p>
<p>I don’t know about previous decades, but currently there are study groups for math and physics. Students should not be toughing it out on their own.</p>
<p>I would also note that different minds resonate to different problems. A teacher who is a great teacher for one student, and on average a good teacher for most students, might still be a suboptimal teacher for a particular student. One reason most strong math programs in United States universities (including Harvard’s) urge their undergraduate majors to go to other universities for graduate school is so that math-oriented learners can be exposed to different teachers. </p>
<p>A typical part of the Math 55 sequence at the beginning is homework assignments designed to size up a student’s background. (That’s the example I gave above, the construction of the complex number system from the Peano axioms, which is a pretty standard thing to do in a strong “transitions” or early upper division course in many universities.) Because they come from all over the world, the Math 55 students STILL have enormous differences in prior background, but if they figure out a way to study together, they can enjoy a very intense learning experience, unlike high school almost anywhere (but possibly like mathematical olympiad training in a few countries).</p>
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<p>It appears that Math 55 has evolved over the decades. Around two decades ago, it seems that the faculty decided that math 55 was too abstract for many of the students taking it, so they made plans to morph what was then math 55 into math 25 as an alternative honors math class to have “the rigor without the abstraction,” according to this article:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=225481[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=225481</a></p>
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<p>It sounds as though math 25 creates a very valuable niche, and before it was created, some students may have been stuck in 55 who would have been better served by math 25.</p>